A DUAL mission for nuclear astrophysics

Gamma-ray astronomy presents an extraordinary scientific potential for the study of the most powerful sources and the most violent events in the Universe. In order to take full advantage of this potential, the next generation of instrumentation for this domain will have to achieve an improvement in sensitivity over present technologies of at least an order of magnitude. The DUAL mission concept takes up this challenge in two complementary ways. While the Wide-Field Compton Telescope (WCT) accumulates data from the full γ-ray sky (100 keV–10 MeV) over the entire mission lifetime, the Laue-Lens Concentrator (LLC) focuses on 56Co emission from SNe Ia (800–900 keV), collecting γ-rays from its large area crystal lens onto the WCT. A boom or two separated spacecraft flying in formation will maintain the gamma-ray optics and detector at the lensʹ focal distance. The sensitive gamma-ray spectroscopy that can be performed by DUAL addresses a wide range of fundamental astrophysical questions such as the life cycles of matter and the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions.