The next-generation BLASTPol experiment
Abstract
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment designed to study the role magnetic fields play in star formation. BLASTPol has had two science flights from McMurdo Station, Antarctica in 2010 and 2012. These flights have produced thousands of polarization vectors at 250, 350 and 500 microns in several molecular cloud targets. We present the design, specifications, and progress towards the next-generation BLASTPol experiment (BLAST-TNG). BLAST-TNG will fly a 40% larger diameter primary mirror, with almost 8 times the number of polarization-sensitive detectors resulting in a factor of 16 increase in mapping speed. With a spatial resolution of 22 arcseconds and four times the field of view of BLASTPol, BLAST-TNG will bridge the angular scales between Planck's low resolution all-sky maps and ALMA's ultra-high resolution narrow fields. The new receiver has a larger cryogenics volume, allowing for a 28 day hold time. BLAST-TNG employs three arrays of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) with 30% fractional bandwidth at 250, 350 and 500 microns. In this paper, we will present the new BLAST-TNG instrument and science objectives.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.3756,
title = {The next-generation BLASTPol experiment},
author = {Bradley Dober and Peter A. R. Ade and Peter Ashton and Francesco E. Angilè and James A. Beall and Dan Becker and Kristi J. Bradford and George Che and Hsiao-Mei Cho and Mark J. Devlin and Laura M. Fissel and Yasuo Fukui and Nicholas Galitzki and Jiansong Gao and Christopher E. Groppi and Seth Hillbrand and Gene C. Hilton and Johannes Hubmayr and Kent D. Irwin and Jeffrey Klein and Jeff Van Lanen and Dale Li and Zhi-Yun Li and Nathan P. Lourie and Hamdi Mani and Peter G. Martin and Philip Mauskopf and Fumitaka Nakamura and Giles Novak and David P. Pappas and Enzo Pascale and Fabio P. Santos and Giorgio Savini and Douglas Scott and Sara Stanchfield and Joel N. Ullom and Matthew Underhill and Michael R. Vissers and Derek Ward-Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.3756},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
12 pages, 6 figures. Presented at SPIE Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes V, June 23, 2014. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9145