1. Pre-flight integration and characterization of the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope
- Author
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Rahlin, A. S., Ade, P. A. R., Amiri, M., Benton, S. J., Bock, J. J., Bond, J. R., Bryan, S. A., Chiang, H. C., Contaldi, C. R., Crill, B. P., Doré, O., Farhang, M., Filippini, J. P., Fissel, L. M., Fraisse, A. A., Gambrel, A. E., Gandilo, N. N., Golwala, S., Gudmundsson, J. E., Halpern, M., Hasselfield, M. F., Hilton, G., Holmes, W. A., Hristov, V. V., Irwin, K. D., Jones, W. C., Kermish, Z. D., Kuo, C. L., MacTavish, C. J., Mason, P. V., Megerian, K., Moncelsi, L., Morford, T. A., Nagy, J. M., Netterfield, C. B., O'Brient, R., Reintsema, C., Ruhl, J. E., Runyan, M. C., Shariff, J. A., Soler, J. D., Trangsrud, A., Tucker, C., Tucker, R. S., Turner, A. D., Weber, A. C., Wiebe, D. V., and Young, E. Y.
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics ,Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics - 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 $B$-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 $\mu$K$\cdot$arcmin at each frequency, which is a factor of $\sim$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., Comment: 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
- Published
- 2014
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