Article Index

THESEUS Scientific Requirements

THESEUS is designed to achieve two primary scientific goals:

  1. Explore the early Universe by providing a complete census of GRBs in the first billion years.

  2. Perform an unprecedentedly deep monitoring of the X-ray transient Universe thus playing a fundamental role in the coming era of multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics

These goals are very demanding in terms of technology and require a combination of on-board capability to perform wide-field X-ray imaging, the ability to obtain broad bandpass X-ray spectra and to localise and characterise the high-energy transients in the optical-IR. The conversion from THESEUS science goals to instrument and spacecraft requirements are shown in the flow chart below.

  • 12
Table 1. Flow-chart showing the logical path from main science goals to instruments and mission requirements.