1620021

The objective of this proposal is to study the extent of diffuse emission from positron annihilation and the decay of Al-26 in our Galaxy by creating deeper and more uniform exposure maps at medium Galactic latitudes. We ask that INTEGRAL devote 2 Ms in AO16 and 2 Ms in AO17 to observing mid-latitude regions of the Inner Galaxy that are underexposed compared with regions near the Plane. The survey regions are bounded by Galactic longitude and latitude -70 deg < l < 70 deg and 7 deg < b < 33 deg. Around 10%-50% of this survey area has 100-500 ks of exposure time at present. In these regions the proposed observations will add a minimum of 200 ks per AO which after two observing cycles represents an increase in exposure time of > 50%-100% compared with archival data. This proposal will build a legacy dataset that is of interest to a wide community of scientists given the variety of sources present and given how the new data complements ongoing surveys of the Galactic Plane Bulge and Center. [truncated! Please see actual data for full text]