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Published September 27, 2012 | Published
Book Section - Chapter Open

The balloon-borne large-aperture submillimeter telescope for polarimetry-BLASTPol: performance and results from the 2010 Antarctic flight

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 uses a total power instrument and an achromatic half-wave plate to modulate the polarization signal. During its first flight from Antarctica in December 2010, BLASTPol made degree scale maps of linearly polarized dust emission from molecular clouds in three wavebands centered at 250, 350, and 500 μm. This unprecedented dataset in terms of sky coverage, with sub-arcminute resolution, allows BLASTPol to trace magnetic fields in star-forming regions at scales ranging from cores to entire molecular cloud complexes. A second long-duration flight is scheduled for December 2012.

Additional Information

© 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). The BLAST collaboration acknowledges the support of NASA through grant numbers NAG5-12785, NAG5-13301 and NNGO-6GI11G, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Leverhulme Trust through the Research Project Grant F/00 407/BN, Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Innovation Trust, the Puerto Rico Space Grant Consortium, the Fondo Istitucional para la Investigacion of the University of Puerto Rico, and the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs; C. B. Netterfield also acknowledges support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. We would also like to thank the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) staff for their outstanding work.

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August 19, 2023
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