How accurately can suborbital experiments measure the CMB?
Abstract
Great efforts are currently being channeled into ground- and balloon-based CMB experiments, mainly to explore anisotropy on small angular scales and polarization. To optimize instrumental design and assess experimental prospects, it is important to understand in detail the atmosphere-related systematic errors that limit the science achievable with new suborbital instruments. For this purpose, we spatially compare the 648 square degree ground- and balloon-based QMASK map with the atmosphere-free WMAP map, finding beautiful agreement on all angular scales where both are sensitive. This is a reassuring quantitative assessment of the power of the state-of-the-art FFT- and matrix-based mapmaking techniques that have been used for QMASK and virtually all subsequent experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0406375,
title = {How accurately can suborbital experiments measure the CMB?},
author = {Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Max Tegmark and Mark Devlin and Lyman Page and Amber Miller and Barth Netterfield and Yongzhong Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0406375},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures. More info at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~angelica/skymap.html QMASK data and covariance matrix at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~xuyz/qmask.html