Engineering topics

Halpern, Mark

Publications and source records attributed to Halpern, Mark.

39 records · Page 3

NASA NTRS2008

BICEP2/SPUD: Searching for Inflation with Degree Scale Polarimetry from the South Pole

BICEP2/SPUD is the new powerful upgrade of the existing BICEP1 experiment, a bolometric receiver to study the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been in operation at the South Pole since January 2006. BICEP2 will provide an improvement up to 10 times mapping speed at 150 GHz compared to BICEP1, using the same BICEP telescope mount. SPUD, a series of compact, mechanically-cooled receivers deployed on the DASI mount at the Pole, will provide similar mapping speed in to BICEP2 in three bands, 100, 150, and 220 GHz. The new system will use large TES focal plane arrays to provide unprecedented sensitivity and excellent control of foreground contamination.

polarization↗

NASA NTRS2004

BLAST: The Balloon-Borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope

BLAST is the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope. It will fly from a Long Duration Balloon (LDB) platform from Antarctica. The telescope design incorporates a 2 m primary mirror with large-format bolometer arrays operating at 250, 350 and 500 microns. By providing the first sensitive large-area (10 sq. deg.) sub-mm surveys at these wavelengths, BLAST will address some of the most important galactic and cosmological questions regarding the formation and evolution of stars, galaxies and clusters. Galactic and extragalactic BLAST surveys will: (1) identify large numbers of high-redshift galaxies; (2) measure photometric redshifts, rest-frame FIR luminosities and star formation rates thereby constraining the evolutionary history of the galaxies that produce the FIR and sub-mm background; (3) measure cold pre-stellar sources associated with the earliest stages of star and planet formation; (4) make high-resolution maps of diffuse galactic emission over a wide range of galactic latitudes. In addition to achieving the above scientific goals, the exciting legacy of the BLAST LDB experiment will be a catalogue of 3000-5000 extragalactic sub-mm sources and a 100 sq. deg. sub-mm galactic plane survey. Multi-frequency follow-up observations from SIRTF, ASTRO-F, and Herschel, together with spectroscopic observations and sub-arcsecond imaging from ALMA are essential to understand the physical nature of the BLAST sources.

Devlin, Mark↗

NASA NTRS1988

Measurements of the anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation and diffuse galactic emission at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths

The results of a balloon-borne observing program to measure the large angular scale brightness distribution of the 2.7 K cosmic background radiation (CBR) at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths are reported. A new determination of the dipole anisotropy of the CBR is found with 3.40 + or - 0.42 mK toward alpha = 12.1 + or - 0.24 hr, delta = - 23 + or - 5 deg in a 1.2 to 8/cm band and 4.7 + or - 1.4 mK toward alpha = 9.9 + 1.7 or - 1.1 hr, delta = - 38 + or - 21 deg between 5 and 18/cm, where the amplitudes are listed as thermodynamic temperatures. New estimates of the absolute temperature in these two bands of 2.86 + or - 0.26 K and 3.01 + or - 0.31 are obtained under the assumption that the CBR has a Planck spectrum. The diffuse Galactic emission is fitted by a secant distribution in Galactic latitude, and the resulting Galactic pole antenna temperatures are given. Maps of sky brightness, measurements of zodiacal emission, and measurements of fluctuations of the atmospheric emission which dominates the noise budget are also presented.

Halpern, Mark↗