The Chinese-French SVOM Mission: studying the brightest astronomical explosions

We present the SVOM mission that the Chinese National Space Agency and the French Space Agency have decided to jointly implement. SVOM has been designed to detect, characterise and quickly localise gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and other types of high-energy transients. For this task the spacecraft will carry two widefield high-energy instruments: ECLAIRs, a hard X-ray imager, and the Gamma-Ray Monitor, a broadband spectrometer. Upon localising a transient, SVOM will quickly slew towards the source and start deep followup observations with two narrow-field telescopes: the Micro-channel X-ray Telescope in X-rays and the Visible Telescope in the visible. The nearly anti-solar pointing of SVOM combined with the fast transmission of GRB positions to the ground in less than 1 minute, will facilitate the observations of SVOM transients by the largest ground based telescopes.

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