Pre-flight integration and characterization of the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope
Abstract
We present the results of integration and characterization of the SPIDER instrument after the 2013 pre-flight campaign. SPIDER is a balloon-borne polarimeter designed to probe the primordial gravitational wave signal in the degree-scale -mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background. With six independent telescopes housing over 2000 detectors in the 94 GHz and 150 GHz frequency bands, SPIDER will map 7.5% of the sky with a depth of 11 to 14 Karcmin at each frequency, which is a factor of 5 improvement over Planck. We discuss the integration of the pointing, cryogenic, electronics, and power sub-systems, as well as pre-flight characterization of the detectors and optical systems. SPIDER is well prepared for a December 2014 flight from Antarctica, and is expected to be limited by astrophysical foreground emission, and not instrumental sensitivity, over the survey region.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.2906,
title = {Pre-flight integration and characterization of the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope},
author = {A. S. Rahlin and P. A. R. Ade and M. Amiri and S. J. Benton and J. J. Bock and J. R. Bond and S. A. Bryan and H. C. Chiang and C. R. Contaldi and B. P. Crill and O. Doré and M. Farhang and J. P. Filippini and L. M. Fissel and A. A. Fraisse and A. E. Gambrel and N. N. Gandilo and S. Golwala and J. E. Gudmundsson and M. Halpern and M. F. Hasselfield and G. Hilton and W. A. Holmes and V. V. Hristov and K. D. Irwin and W. C. Jones and Z. D. Kermish and C. L. Kuo and C. J. MacTavish and P. V. Mason and K. Megerian and L. Moncelsi and T. A. Morford and J. M. Nagy and C. B. Netterfield and R. O'Brient and C. Reintsema and J. E. Ruhl and M. C. Runyan and J. A. Shariff and J. D. Soler and A. Trangsrud and C. Tucker and R. S. Tucker and A. D. Turner and A. C. Weber and D. V. Wiebe and E. Y. Young},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.2906},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
25 pages, 14 figures. Presented at SPIE Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy VII, June 26, 2014. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153