BlackCAT: A CubeSat for Detecting High-Redshift Gamma-Ray Bursts and Multi-Messenger Counterparts

BlackCAT is a 6U CubeSat mission designed to monitor the soft x-ray sky, searching for distant gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), counterparts to gravitational-wave events, and other high-energy transient phenomena. The instrument makes use of an array of four event-driven X-ray hybrid CMOS detectors and a coded-aperture mask. This design provides a large field of view (~0.9 sr) while enabling sub-arcminute localization of sources, making BlackCAT an effective tool for finding bursts and flare events. BlackCAT’s sensitivity in the soft x-ray band will make it a particularly valuable detector of high-redshift GRBs, which can serve as powerful probes of star formation and reionization in the early universe. Ground and space-based follow-up observations of GRB afterglows, enabled by rapid alerts from BlackCAT, will allow measurements of redshifts and characterization of the environments in which bursts occurred. BlackCAT will also serve to complement various multi-messenger observatories, helping to identify and localize X-ray counterparts to gravitational-wave and neutrino events. In this presentation, we discuss the design of the BlackCAT CubeSat and its expected science capabilities.