The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST
Abstract
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a sub-orbital surveying experiment designed to study the evolutionary history and processes of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and galaxies at cosmological distances. The BLAST continuum camera, which consists of 270 detectors distributed between 3 arrays, observes simultaneously in broad-band (30%) spectral-windows at 250, 350, and 500 microns. The optical design is based on a 2m diameter telescope, providing a diffraction-limited resolution of 30" at 250 microns. The gondola pointing system enables raster mapping of arbitrary geometry, with a repeatable positional accuracy of ~30"; post-flight pointing reconstruction to ~5" rms is achieved. The on-board telescope control software permits autonomous execution of a pre-selected set of maps, with the option of manual override. In this paper we describe the primary characteristics and measured in-flight performance of BLAST. BLAST performed a test-flight in 2003 and has since made two scientifically productive long-duration balloon flights: a 100-hour flight from ESRANGE (Kiruna), Sweden to Victoria Island, northern Canada in June 2005; and a 250-hour, circumpolar-flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in December 2006.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0711.3465,
title = {The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST},
author = {E. Pascale and P. A. R. Ade and J. J. Bock and E. L. Chapin and J. Chung and M. J. Devlin and S Dicker and M. Griffin and J. O. Gundersen and M. Halpern and P. C. Hargrave and D. H. Hughes and J. Klein and C. J. MacTavish and G. Marsden and P. G. Martin and T. G. Martin and P. Mauskopf and C. B. Netterfield and L. Olmi and G. Patanchon and M. Rex and D. Scott and C. Semisch and N. Thomas and M. D. P. Truch and C. Tucker and G. S. Tucker and M. P. Viero and D. V. Wiebe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0711.3465},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
38 Pages, 11 figures; Replaced with version accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal; related results available at http://blastexperiment.info/