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 2 m 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 500μm. 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 ∼ ″, reconstructed to better than 5″ rms in post-flight 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 deg2) submillimeter surveys at these wavelengths. As a pathfinder for the SPIRE instrument on Herschel, 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.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Millimeter and Submillimeter Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy IV |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2008 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | Millimeter and Submillimeter Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy IV - Marseille, France Duration: Jun 26 2008 → Jun 28 2008 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering |
---|---|
Volume | 7020 |
ISSN (Print) | 0277-786X |
Other
Other | Millimeter and Submillimeter Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy IV |
---|---|
Country/Territory | France |
City | Marseille |
Period | 6/26/08 → 6/28/08 |
Keywords
- Balloons
- Instrumentation:miscellaneous
- Polarization
- Stars:formation
- Submillimeter
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Computer Science Applications
- Applied Mathematics
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering