Abstract
The Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon 2 (EUSO-SPB2) was launched May 13th 2023 from Wanaka, New Zealand with a mission to make new measurements from suborbital space as a precursor for future space missions that aim to identify the sources ultra-high energy cosmic rays and very high energy neutrinos. The EUSO-SPB2 payload featured two 1m diameter aperture telescopes. The Fluorescence Telescope (FT) utilized a PMT camera pointed in nadir to record fluorescence light from cosmic ray extensive air showers (EASs) with energies above 1 EeV in its field of view of 36 by 12 degrees. The Cherenkov Telescope (CT) featured a silicon photomultiplier camera system with a field of view of 12 by 6 degrees for observing Cherenkov emission of cosmic ray EASs with energies above 1 PeV with an above-the-limb geometry and of PeV-scale EASs initiated by neutrino-sourced tau decay. I will present an overview of the EUSO-SPB2 mission, its science goals, and a summary of the Targets of Opportunity catalog, prioritization, and software that was used during the 2023 flight to identify potential sources of tau neutrinos including gamma-ray bursts, tidal disruption events, and binary neutron star mergers. I will also present preliminary results as available from the 2023 flight.
*The authors acknowledge the support by NASA awards 11-APRA-0058, 16-APROBES16-0023, 17-APRA17-0066, NNX17AJ82G, NNX13AH54G, 80NSSC18K0246, 80NSSC18K0473,80NSSC19K0626, 80NSSC18K0464, 80NSSC22K1488, 80NSSC19K0627 and 80NSSC22K0426, the French space agency CNES, National Science Centre in Poland grant n. 2017/27/B/ST9/02162, and by ASI-INFN agreement n. 2021-8-HH.0 and its amendments. This research used resources of the US National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the DOE Science User Facility operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. We acknowledge the NASA BPO and CSBF staffs for their extensive support. We also acknowledge the invaluable contributions of the administrative and technical staffs at our home institutions.
