Special Astrophysics Seminar

The BLAST-pol and Spider Balloon-borne Telescopes

Steve Benton

University of Toronto

I will discuss my work on a pair of balloon-borne telescopes: BLAST-pol, and Spider. My focus will be the instruments themselves, why they observe from balloons, and the BLASTbus electronics. The BLASTbus system is used by both experiments for a wide variety purposes, such as payload attitude control, cryogenic housekeeping, and low-noise readout of NTD bolometers.

Spider is a polarimeter of the microwave background attempting to detect the “B-mode” polarization signature of cosmological inflation. BLAST-pol observes thermal emission from interstellar dust in galactic star-forming regions, and traces magnetic fields via polarization. I will present data from BLAST-pol's 2010 and 2012 flights.