The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for polarization: BLAST-pol

G Marsden,C J Mactavish,J J Bock,J Chung,D H Hughes,T G Martin,C Tucker,D Scott,Matt Griffin ,Simon Dicker ,Nicholas E Thomas ,Laura M Fissel ,Christopher Semisch ,Matthew D P Truch ,Derek Ward-Thompson ,Gregory S Tucker ,Peter Charles Hargrave ,Tristan G Matthews ,S J Benton ,Marco P Viero ,Philip Daniel Mauskopf ,Edward L Chapin ,Giles Novak ,P G Martín ,Mark J Devlin ,Peter A R Ade ,Andrei Korotkov ,Enzo Pascale ,Joshua O Gundersen ,L Olmi,M Halpern,G Savini,L Moncelsi,G Patanchon,C B Netterfield,M Rex,J Klein,Donald Wiebe

doi:10.1117/12.788413

Abstract

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a sub-orbital experiment designed to study the process of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and in galaxies at cosmological distances. Using a 2m Cassegrain telescope, BLAST images the sky onto a focal plane, which consists of 270 bolometric detectors split between three arrays, observing simultaneously in 30% wide bands, centered at 250, 350, and 500 μm. The diffraction-limited optical system provides a resolution of 30" at 250 μm. The pointing system enables raster-like scans with a positional accuracy of ~30", reconstructed to better than 5" rms in postflight analysis. BLAST had two successful flights, from the Arctic in 2005, and from Antarctica in 2006, which provided the first high-resolution and large-area (~0.8−200 deg<sup>2</sup>) submillimeter surveys at these wavelengths. As a pathfinder for the SPIRE instrument on <i>Herschel</i>, BLAST shares with the ESA satellite similar focal plane technology and scientific motivation. A third flight in 2009 will see the instrument modified to be polarization-sensitive (BLAST-pol). With its unprecedented mapping speed and resolution, BLAST-pol will provide insights into Galactic star-forming nurseries, and give the necessary link between the larger, coarse resolution surveys and the narrow, resolved observations of star-forming structures from space and ground based instruments being commissioned in the next 5 years.

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