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Limitations set by the light curves and duration of these transient events demand three main requirements for a future survey mission: constant all-sky monitoring, a high photometric precision (only achievable in space), and red-optical or near-IR observing capabilities. No current or past missions are able to observe in this parameter space. Therefore, CuRIOS will utilize economies of scale to create an affordable, all-sky survey mission made of several hundred 12U 16U CubeSats to meet these demands and uncover the transient universe.
One of CuRIOS’s main science goal will be to observe microlensing events from stellar-mass black holes in the Galactic Center region. These observations will function to constrain our order-of-magnitude estimation for stellar-mass BH populations in the Milky Way and support further discoveries with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) by revealing BH binary fractions, mass functions, and kick velocity distributions.
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