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The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST

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 نشر من قبل Matthew Truch
 تاريخ النشر 2008
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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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.



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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 500 microns. The diffraction-limited optical system provides a resolution of 30 at 250 microns. The pointing system enables raster-like scans with a positional accuracy of ~30, 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 deg^2) 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.
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