# Gamma-ray Bursts: 50 Years and Counting!
## 11 Future Prospects  
As we have seen, the evolution of our understanding of the GRB phenomenon is intimately linked to the technological-scientific advances that have allowed us to carry out new measurements, thus revealing new pieces of this complex puzzle from time to time. Since a complete review of all the very interesting proposals for new instruments that could lead to a better understanding of these phenomena is an enormous undertaking, well beyond the scope of the present article, we mention here just four examples of instruments designed specifically for the observation of GRBs (among other things) that are guaranteed to be able to make a very important contribution to this field in the near future. The High Energy Modular Ensemble of Satellites (HERMES) is a project for a constellation of nanosatellites (CubeSats) sensitive in the 50-300 keV range, with full-sky coverage, that will exploit the \"temporal triangulation\" technique to obtain the accurate localizations of GRB signals (and transient signals in general). In particular, the complete HERMES con stellation should be able to obtain a localization accuracy better than 15\({}^{\prime}\) (approx. an error area \(<\) 0.2 deg\({}^{2}\)) for long GRBs and a localization better than 1\({}^{\circ}\) (error area \(\sim\) 3 deg\({}^{2}\)) for short GRBs [217]. This is thanks to the very high precision of the timing (better than a few hundred nanoseconds), which allows the measurement of the delays between the arrival times of the signal at the different satellites at less than a few dozen us, thus managing to accurately estimate the direction of arrival of the signal relative to the constellation. As we have seen, the ability to obtain the accurate and timely localizations of GRBs is essential to organizing a proper observational follow-up strategy. HERMES will therefore be extremely important in the future for the study of GRBs (and, in general, of gamma-ray transient events) thanks to its unprecedented localization capabilities. It should also be noted that a major advantage of CubeSats over typical larger gamma-ray space missions is that it is relatively cheap, greatly limiting construction and launch costs. A great milestone for this project was achieved on 1 December 2023 with the launch of the Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal nanosatellite (SpIRIT). SpIRIT, an Australian-Italian collaborative project, will be the first satellite of the HERMES Scientific Pathfinder Constellation. The Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) [218; 219] is a Chinese-French-approved mission, with a launch scheduled for spring 2024. SVOM will host four instruments on board and will be complemented by a ground segment composed of three other instruments. SVOM's payload is composed of the following four main instruments: a wide-field coded-mask camera sensitive between 4 and 120 keV to quickly localize GRBs with an accuracy of a few arcmin called ECLAIRs; a gamma-ray non-imaging spectrophotometer (GRM) sensitive in the 50 keV to 5 MeV energy range for monitoring the FoV of ECLAIRs; and two narrow-FoV telescopes for the study of GRB afterglows, one operating in the soft X-rays (MXT) and one in the optical band (VT). The ground segment includes three dedicated instruments: a set of cameras for follow-up observation of the ECLAIR FoV in the visible (GWAC) and two robotic telescopes (GFT), sensitive in the visible and NIR, for studying the GRB afterglow [218]. The ground segment will be fundamental for coordinated and automated follow-up observations of satellite alerts. This design was developed in order to better study two categories of GRBs specifically: very distant GRBs with redshifts \(z>5\) (in order to be able to use them as cosmological probes) and faint/soft nearby GRBs, effectively expanding on the scientific goals borrowed from _Swift_[219].