The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST

By E. Pascale, P. Ade, J. Bock, E. Chapin, J. Chung, M. Devlin, S. Dicker, M. Griffin, J. Gundersen, Mark Halpern and 20 more. 2007

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a suborbital surveying experiment designed to study the evolutionary history and processes of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and galaxies at cosmological distances. The BLAST continuum camera, which consists of 270 detectors distributed between three arrays, observes simultaneously in broadband (30%) spectral windows at 250, 350, and 500 μm. The optical design is based on a 2 m diameter telescope, providing a diffraction-limited resolution of 30″ at 250 μm. The gondola pointing system enables raster mapping of arbitrary geometry, with a repeatable positional accuracy of ~30″; postflight pointing reconstruction to ≲5″ rms is achieved. The onboard telescope control software permits autonomous execution of a preselected set of maps, with the option of manual override. In this paper we describe the primary characteristics and measured in-flight performance of BLAST. BLAST performed a test flight in 2003 and has since made two scientifically productive long-duration balloon flights: a 100 hr flight from ESRANGE (Kiruna), Sweden to Victoria Island, northern Canada in 2005 June; and a 250 hr, circumpolar flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in 2006 December.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70131b0d29ec3ad2f1ed486d837ae79407317c0e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Casey
2. A. Cooray
3. D. M. Alexander
4. D. Elbaz
5. É. Le Floc'h
6. R. Ivison
7. D. Narayanan
8. M. B'ethermin

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. A. Cooray
2. R. Ivison
3. M. Pohlen
4. A. P'enin
5. Lloyd Knox
6. Mark Halpern
7. C. Casey
8. H. Dole

In Instrumentation

1. A. Cooray
2. C. Casey
3. É. Le Floc'h
4. M. B'ethermin
5. B. Magnelli
6. O. Ilbert
7. Mara Salvato
8. H. Aussel

Citations in the corpus

• Scuba-2: On-sky calibration using submillimetre standard sources (2013, methodology): “At 450µm, the integrated flux of 5.4 Jy agrees reasonably with the SED fit from Truch et al. (2008).”
• HerMES: deep number counts at 250 μm, 350 μm and 500 μm in the COSMOS and GOODS-N fields and the build-up of the cosmic infrared background (2012, methodology): “Using a P(D) analysis, Patanchon et al. (2009) produced deep counts from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST, Pascale et al. 2008; Devlin et al. 2009) data.”
• Modeling the evolution of infrared galaxies: a parametric backward evolution model (2010, methodology): “Article published by EDP Sciences A4, page 1 of 20 The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) experiment (Pascale et al. 2008; Devlin et al. 2009) and the spectral and photometric imaging receiver (SPIRE) instrument (Griffin et al. 2010) onboard the Herchel space telescope…”
• MEASUREMENTS OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES WITH THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE (2009, background): “BLAST recently detected this clustered term for DSFGs at 600 - 1200 GHz (500 - 250µm) (Viero et al. 2009).”
• BLAST: RESOLVING THE COSMIC SUBMILLIMETER BACKGROUND (2009, background): “Further details on the instrument may be found in Pascale et al. (2008), and the flight performance and calibration for the 2006 flight are provided in Truch et al. (2009).”