Localization of Gamma-ray Bursts in a Balloon-Borne Telescope

Multi-messenger astrophysics combines observations from multiple instruments to study transient astrophysical phenomena, many occurring at seconds-level timescales. To identify and precisely localize these events in the sky, current systems often search through extensive sensor data, requiring resource-intensive computation to achieve results on the timescale of the events themselves. We seek to reduce computational requirements so as to perform real-time event localization with limited computational resources suitable for an orbital platform. This work studies the performance of a computational pipeline for real-time gamma-ray burst (GRB) detection and localization aboard the Antarctic Demonstrator for the Advanced Particle-astro-physics Telescope (ADAPT), a balloon-borne prototype for a space-based gamma-ray observatory supporting multi-messenger observations. ADAPT observes gamma-ray Compton scattering, then uses the pipeline to combine information from multiple photons to identify a GRB's source direction. In this paper, we identify, model, and measure key uncertainties, then propose instrumentation and computational improvements to reduce them, substantially improving localization accuracy.