Abstract
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), which was formerly known as the Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT), is a balloon-borne soft gamma-ray telescope (0.2-5 MeV) designed to probe the origins of Galactic positrons, uncover sites of nucleosynthesis in the Galaxy, and perform pioneering studies of gamma-ray polarization in a number of source classes. COSI uses a compact Compton telescope design, resulting from a decade of development under NASA's ROSES program - a modern take on techniques successfully pioneered by COMPTEL on CGRO. We have rebuilt the COSI instrument and flight systems, upgraded for balloon flights and improved polarization sensitivity. We will present the redesign of COSI and the overall goals of the 5-year science program. Three science flights are planned to fulfill the COSI science goals: an LDB in 2014 from Antarctica on a superpressure balloon (SuperCOSI), followed by two 100-day ULDB flights from New Zealand. COSI is a wide-field survey telescope designed to perform imaging, spectroscopy, and polarization measurements. It employs a novel Compton telescope design utilizing a compact array of cross-strip germanium detectors (GeDs) to resolve individual gamma-ray interactions with high spectral and spatial resolution. The COSI array is housed in a common vacuum cryostat cooled by a mechanical cryocooler. An active CsI shield encloses the cryostat on the sides and bottom. The FoV of the instrument covers 25% of the full sky at a given moment. The COSI instrument is mature, building upon considerable heritage from the previous NCT balloon instrument that underwent a successful technology demonstration flight in June 2005 from Fort Sumner, NM, a successful "first light" science flight from Fort Sumner in May 2009, and quickly turned around and delivered on time for a launch campaign from Alice Springs, Australia in June 2010, where it unfortunately suffered a launch mishap. The NCT instrument and Flight System are being rebuilt under the NASA/ROSES program as a ULDB payload, and are being integrated for flight by Fall 2014. COSI has been upgraded from the previous NCT instrument by conversion to a detector configuration optimized for polarization sensitivity and addition of a cryocooler to remove consumables (LN2) for ULDB flights. In this talk, we will present the redesign of the instrument and payload, as well as the overall flight program and science goals for SuperCOSI and for our ULDB science flight program.