The bc-tools library: an open-source software for BurstCube and other GRB satellites

BurstCube is a CubeSat designed to detect gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and enable multi-messenger observations, launching in 2023. BurstCube makes use of low-power silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) coupled to cesium iodide (CsI) crystal scintillators to detect, localize and measure the spectrum and duration of GRBs. The bc-tools library is the main analysis software that will perform these tasks. It builds and expands upon the gbm-data-tools library, by Fermi-GBM, and takes into account the full response of the instrument simulated with GEANT4 and MEGAlib. The bc-tools library is an open-source and detector-agnostic Python package that can be used to analyze data from other count-based GRB detectors like BurstCube, as well as to extend the capabilities of instruments designed primarily as imaging detectors, like AMEGO-X and GECCO. This work will discuss the algorithms, usage and applications of bc-tools.