Spider is a balloon-borne experiment that will measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background over a large fraction of a sky at 1 degree resolution. Six monochromatic refracting millimeter-wave telescopes with large arrays of antenna-coupled transition-edge superconducting bolometers will provide system sensitivities of 4.2 and 3.1 micro K_cmb rt s at 100 and 150 GHz, respectively. A rotating half-wave plate will modulate the polarization sensitivity of each telescope, controlling systematics. Bolometer arrays operating at 225 GHz and 275 GHz will allow removal of polarized galactic foregrounds. In a 2-6 day first flight from Alice Springs, Australia in 2010, Spider will map 50% of the sky to a depth necessary to improve our knowledge of the reionization optical depth by a large factor.
@article{arxiv.0807.1548,
title = {SPIDER: A Balloon-borne Large-scale CMB Polarimeter},
author = {B. P. Crill and P. A. R. Ade and E. S. Battistelli and S. Benton and R. Bihary and J. J. Bock and J. R. Bond and J. Brevik and S. Bryan and C. R. Contaldi and O. Dore and M. Farhang and L. Fissel and S. R. Golwala and M. Halpern and G. Hilton and W. Holmes and V. V. Hristov and K. Irwin and W. C. Jones and C. L. Kuo and A. E. Lange and C. Lawrie and C. J. MacTavish and T. G. Martin and P. Mason and T. E. Montroy and C. B. Netterfield and E. Pascale and D. Riley and J. E. Ruhl and M. C. Runyan and A. Trangsrud and C. Tucker and A. Turner and M. Viero and D. Wiebe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.1548},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
To appear in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 7010, Editors: Jacobus M. Oschmann, Jr.; Mattheus W. M. de Graauw; Howard A. MacEwen, "Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2008: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter"