The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry-BLASTPol: performance and results from the 2012 Antarctic flight

Galitzki, N., Ade, P. A. R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-0401, Angilè, F. E., Benton, S. J., Devlin, M. J., Dober, B., Fissel, L. M., Fukui, Y., Gandilo, N. N., Klein, J., Korotkov, A. L., Matthews, T. G., Moncelsi, L., Netterfield, C. B., Novak, G., Nutter, D., Pascale, E., Poidevin, F., Savini, G., Scott, D., Shariff, J. A., Soler, J. D., Tucker, C. E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1851-3918, Tucker, G. S. and Ward-Thompson, D. 2014. The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry-BLASTPol: performance and results from the 2012 Antarctic flight. Presented at: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, July 2014. Published in: Stepp, Larry M., Gilmozzi, Roberto and Hall, Helen J. eds. Proceedings Volume 9145, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes V. , vol.9145 SPIE, 91450R. 10.1117/12.2054759

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment, designed to study the role played by magnetic fields in the star formation process. BLASTPol observes polarized light using a total power instrument, photolithographic polarizing grids, and an achromatic half-wave plate to modulate the polarization signal. During its second flight from Antarctica in December 2012, BLASTPol made degree scale maps of linearly polarized dust emission from molecular clouds in three wavebands, centered at 250, 350, and 500 μm. The instrumental performance was an improvement over the 2010 BLASTPol ight, with decreased systematics resulting in a higher number of confirmed polarization vectors. The resultant dataset allows BLASTPol to trace magnetic fields in star-forming regions at scales ranging from cores to entire molecular cloud complexes.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	SPIE
ISSN:	0277-786X
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2023 13:26
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/157688

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item