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

• Published in: SPIE Proceedings, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes V
• Main Authors: Galitzki, N., Moncelsi, L.
• Other Authors: Stepp, Larry M., Gilmozzi, Roberto, Hall, Helen J.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2014
• Subjects: Antarctic; Canada; Soler; Antarc*; Antarctica; National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054759

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 flight, 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. © 2014 SPIE. The BLAST collaboration acknowledges the support of NASA through grant numbers NNX13AE50G S03 and NNX09AB98G, 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 Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium, and the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. F. Poidevin thanks the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under the Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2010-00064 (EPI: Exploring the Physics of Inflation) for its support. J. D. Soler acknowledges the support the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ERC grant agreementt number 267934. We would also like to thank the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) staff for their continued outstanding work. Published - Galitzki_2014p91450R.pdf