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Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for polarization: BLAST-pol.

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a sub-orbital experiment designed to study the process of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and in galaxies at cosmological distances. Using a 2m Cassegrain telescope, BLAST images the sky onto a focal plane, which consists of 270 bolometric detectors split between three arrays, observing simultaneously in 30% wide bands, centered at 250, 350, and 500 μm. The diffraction-limited optical system provides a resolution of 30" at 250 μm. The pointing system enables raster-like scans with a positional accuracy of ~30", reconstructed to better than 5" rms in postflight analysis. BLAST had two successful flights, from the Arctic in 2005, and from Antarctica in 2006, which provided the first high-resolution and large-area (~0.8−200 deg2) submillimeter surveys at these wavelengths. As a pathfinder for the SPIRE instrument on Herschel, BLAST shares with the ESA satellite similar focal plane technology and scientific motivation. A third flight in 2009 will see the instrument modified to be polarization-sensitive (BLAST-pol). With its unprecedented mapping speed and resolution, BLAST-pol will provide insights into Galactic star-forming nurseries, and give the necessary link between the larger, coarse resolution surveys and the narrow, resolved observations of star-forming structures from space and ground based instruments being commissioned in the next 5 years. Copyright 2008 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited

Text

2011-09-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/37291

Marsden, Gaelen; Ade, Peter A. R.; Bock, James J.; Chapin, Edward L.; Chung, Jaspaul; Devlin, Mark J.; Dicker, Simon R.; Fissel, Laura M.; Griffin, Matt; Gundersen, Joshua O.; Halpern, Mark; Hargrave, Peter C.; Hughes, David H.; Klein, Jeffery; Korotkov, Andrei; MacTavish, Carrie J.; Martin, Peter G.; Martin, T. G.; Matthews, Tristan G.; Mauskopf, Philip D.; Moncelsi, Lorenzo; Netterfield, C. Barth; Novak, Giles; Pascale, Enzo; Olmi, Luca; Patanchon, Guillaume; Rex, Marie; Savini, Giorgio; Scott, Douglas; Semisch, Christopher; Thomas, Nicholas E.; Truch, Matthew D. P.; Tucker, Carole E.; Tucker, Gregory S.; Viero, Marco P.; Ward-Thompson, Derek Wiebe, Donald V. Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for polarization: BLAST-pol. Millimeter and Submillimeter Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy IV, edited by William D. Duncan, Wayne S. Holland, Stafford Withington, Jonas Zmuidzina, Proceedings of SPIE Volume 7020, 702002, 2008.

Reviewed

Halpern, Mark

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