Speaker
Description
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a 0.2-5 MeV gamma-ray telescope designed for spectroscopy, imaging, and polarimetry of astrophysical sources. With its excellent energy resolution and localization capabilities, COSI is uniquely equipped to study signatures of electron-positron annihilation at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, radioactive decays from stellar and explosive nucleosynthesis, and has potential to serve as a key instrument for finding gamma-ray counterparts to multimessenger events, including neutron star mergers, high-energy neutrinos, and nearby supernovae. This presentation will motivate these scientific goals and explain how COSI, originally developed as a balloon-borne instrument, contributes to the understanding of each topic. Relevant results from COSI's 46-day balloon flight from 2016 serve as proof-of-concept for the upcoming iteration of COSI as a NASA Small Explorer satellite mission, slated for launch in 2026. The COSI satellite is expected to make great advancements in the MeV regime which will provide important constraints on astrophysical models of gamma-ray emission.
