Scientific Performance of a Nano-satellite MeV Telescope

Over the past two decades, both X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy have experienced great progress. However, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum around similar to 1 MeV is not so thoroughly explored. Future medium-sized gamma-ray telescopes will fill this gap in observations. As the timescale for the development and launch of a medium-class mission is similar to 10 years, with substantial costs, we propose a different approach for the immediate future. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of a much smaller and cheaper detector: a nano-satellite Compton telescope, based on the CubeSat architecture. The scientific performance of this telescope would be well below that of the instrument expected for the future larger missions; however, via simulations, we estimate that such a compact telescope will achieve a performance similar to that of COMPTEL.