The Advanced Compton Telescope
Steven Boggs
University of California, Berkeley / Space Sciences Laboratory
boggs@ssl.berkeley.edu
Additional authors: the ACT Team
ACT, the next major step in gamma-ray astronomy, will probe the fires where chemical elements are formed through the systematic study of nuclear emission from supernova explosions with high spectral resolution. ACT requires two orders of magnitude improvement in sensitivity over current gamma-ray observatories to achieve this goal. ACT will also enable new classes of black hole observations, including all-sky monitoring for transients, detailed spectra of the peak emission region near 1 MeV, high sensitivity to positron annihilation emission, and novel sensitivity to polarization. ACT was chosen by NASA for a 1-year Vision Mission concept study, with the primary goals of identifying the key technologies and developing the detailed mission concept. The technological advances enabling ACT are the development of 3-D position-sensitive detectors and corresponding read-out electronics. We will discuss the mission objectives, the goals of the concept study, and a technology roadmap to achieve the goals for ACT.
