Design and pre-flight performance of SPIDER 280 GHz receivers

• Main Authors: Shaw, E. C., Ade, P. A. R., Akers, S., Amiri, M., Austermann, J., Beall, J., Becker, D. T., Benton, S. J., Bergman, A. S., Bock, J. J., Bond, J. R., Bryan, S. A., Chiang, H. C., Contaldi, C. R., Domagalski, R. S., Doré, O., Duff, S. M., Duivenvoorden, A. J., Eriksen, H. K., Farhang, M., Filippini, J. P., Fissel, L. M., Fraisse, A. A., Freese, K., Galloway, M., Gambrel, A. E., Gandilo, N. N., Ganga, K., Grigorian, A., Gualtieri, R., Gudmundsson, J. E., Halpern, M., Hartley, J., Hasselfield, M., Hilton, G., Holmes, W., Hristov, V. V., Huang, Z., Hubmayr, J., Irwin, K. D., Jones, W. C., Kahn, A., Kuo, C. L., Kermish, Z. D., Lennox, A., Leung, J. S. -Y., Li, S., Mason, P. V., Megerian, K., Mocanu, L. M., Moncelsi, L., Morford, T. A., Nagy, J. M., Nie, R., Netterfield, C. B., Nolta, M., Osherson, B., Padilla, I. L., Rahlin, A. S., Redmond, S., Reintsema, C., Romualdez, L. J., Ruhl, J. E., Runyan, M. C., Shariff, J. A., Shiu, C., Soler, J. D., Song, X., Thommesen, H., Trangsrud, A., Tucker, C., Tucker, R. S., Turner, A. D., Ullom, J., van der List, J. F., Van Lanen, J., Vissers, M. R., Weber, A. C., Wen, S., Wehus, I. K., Wiebe, D. V., Young, E. Y.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2020
• Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM; Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics astro-ph.CO; FOS Physical sciences; Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2012.12407; https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12407

In this work we describe upgrades to the Spider balloon-borne telescope in preparation for its second flight, currently planned for December 2021. The Spider instrument is optimized to search for a primordial B-mode polarization signature in the cosmic microwave background at degree angular scales. During its first flight in 2015, Spider mapped ~10% of the sky at 95 and 150 GHz. The payload for the second Antarctic flight will incorporate three new 280 GHz receivers alongside three refurbished 95- and 150 GHz receivers from Spider's first flight. In this work we discuss the design and characterization of these new receivers, which employ over 1500 feedhorn-coupled transition-edge sensors. We describe pre-flight laboratory measurements of detector properties, and the optical performance of completed receivers. These receivers will map a wide area of the sky at 280 GHz, providing new information on polarized Galactic dust emission that will help to separate it from the cosmological signal. : 13 pages, 8 figures; as published in the conference proceedings for SPIE Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy X (2020)