CuRIOS

(CubeSats for Rapid IR and Optical Surveys)

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CuRIOS is a concept for a fleet of Cube Satellites that will study star death and afterlife by observing transient phenomena originating from black holes and neutron stars. The CuRIOS swarm will provide constant (all the time) coverage of the entire sky in the optical/near-IR, creating a continuous survey of transient phenomena. 

The rise of time-domain astronomy including electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves, microlensing, transients, and even astrometry with Gaia, show the need for broadband surveys to study the transient universe.  Surveys are often the pioneering missions used to sample and explore new parameter spaces. At this time, many wide-field photometric surveys utilize ground-based telescopes to avoid the expenses associated with a space-based counterpart. Of the surveys that exist in space, the overwhelming majority are built for measurements in the optical.

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 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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