TY - GEN
T1 - Design and characterization of a balloon-borne diffraction-limited submillimeter telescope platform for BLAST-TNG
AU - Lourie, Nathan P.
AU - Angilé, Francisco E.
AU - Ashton, Peter C.
AU - Catanzaro, Brian
AU - Devlin, Mark J.
AU - Dicker, Simon
AU - Didier, Joy
AU - Dober, Bradley
AU - Fissel, Laura M.
AU - Galitzki, Nicholas
AU - Gordon, Samuel
AU - Klein, Jeffrey
AU - Lowe, Ian
AU - Mauskopf, Philip
AU - Nati, Federico
AU - Novak, Giles
AU - Romualdez, L. Javier
AU - Soler, Juan D.
AU - Williams, Paul A.
N1 - Funding Information:
The BLAST-TNG collaboration acknowledges the support of NASA under award numbers NNX13AE50G and 80NSSC18K0481, and the NNX13CM03C. Detector development is supported in part by NASA through NNH13ZDA001N-APRA. J.D.S. acknowledges the support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 Framework Program via the Consolidator Grant CSF-648505. S.G. is supported through a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF) NNX16AO91H. The BLAST-TNG telescope is supported in part through the NASA SBIR/STTR office and developed at Alliance Spacesystems. The collaboration also acknowledges the extensive machining, design, and fabrication efforts of Jeffrey Hancock and Harold Borders at the University of Pennsylvania and Matthew Underhill at Arizona State University. Paul Dowkontt at Washington University in St. Louis provided design assistance for the sun shield fitting design. The BLAST-TNG team also recognizes the contribution of undergraduate and post-baccalaureate interns to the gondola development, especially Mark Giovinazzi, Erin Healy, Gregory Kofman, Aaron Mathews, Timothy McSorely, Michael Plumb, Steven Russel, and Nathan Schor.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 SPIE.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The Next Generation Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter mapping experiment planned for a 28 day long-duration balloon (LDB) flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica during the 2018-2019 season. BLAST-TNG will detect submillimeter polarized interstellar dust emission, tracing magnetic fields in galactic molecular clouds. BLAST-TNG will be the first polarimeter with the sensitivity and resolution to probe the ∼0.1 parsec-scale features that are critical to understanding the origin of structures in the interstellar medium. With three detector arrays operating at 250, 350, and 500 μm (1200, 857, and 600 GHz), BLAST-TNG will obtain diffraction-limited resolution at each waveband of 30, 41, and 59 arcseconds respectively. To achieve the submillimeter resolution necessary for its science goals, the BLAST-TNG telescope features a 2.5 m aperture carbon fiber composite primary mirror, one of the largest mirrors flown on a balloon platform. Successful performance of such a large telescope on a balloon-borne platform requires stiff, lightweight optical components and mounting structures. Through a combination of optical metrology and finite element modeling of thermal and mechanical stresses on both the telescope optics and mounting structures, we expect diffractionlimited resolution at all our wavebands. We expect pointing errors due to deformation of the telescope mount to be negligible. We have developed a detailed thermal model of the sun shielding, gondola, and optical components to optimize our observing strategy and increase the stability of the telescope over the flight. We present preflight characterization of the telescope and its platform.
AB - The Next Generation Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter mapping experiment planned for a 28 day long-duration balloon (LDB) flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica during the 2018-2019 season. BLAST-TNG will detect submillimeter polarized interstellar dust emission, tracing magnetic fields in galactic molecular clouds. BLAST-TNG will be the first polarimeter with the sensitivity and resolution to probe the ∼0.1 parsec-scale features that are critical to understanding the origin of structures in the interstellar medium. With three detector arrays operating at 250, 350, and 500 μm (1200, 857, and 600 GHz), BLAST-TNG will obtain diffraction-limited resolution at each waveband of 30, 41, and 59 arcseconds respectively. To achieve the submillimeter resolution necessary for its science goals, the BLAST-TNG telescope features a 2.5 m aperture carbon fiber composite primary mirror, one of the largest mirrors flown on a balloon platform. Successful performance of such a large telescope on a balloon-borne platform requires stiff, lightweight optical components and mounting structures. Through a combination of optical metrology and finite element modeling of thermal and mechanical stresses on both the telescope optics and mounting structures, we expect diffractionlimited resolution at all our wavebands. We expect pointing errors due to deformation of the telescope mount to be negligible. We have developed a detailed thermal model of the sun shielding, gondola, and optical components to optimize our observing strategy and increase the stability of the telescope over the flight. We present preflight characterization of the telescope and its platform.
KW - BLAST-TNG
KW - Carbon fiber telescope
KW - Gondola
KW - Metrology
KW - Scientific ballooning
KW - Star formation
KW - Submillimeter optics
KW - Telescope structures
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85051182270&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1117/12.2314380
DO - 10.1117/12.2314380
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85051182270
T3 - Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
BT - Ground-Based and Airborne Telescopes VII
A2 - Marshall, Heather K.
A2 - Spyromilio, Jason
PB - SPIE
T2 - Ground-Based and Airborne Telescopes VII 2018
Y2 - 10 June 2018 through 15 June 2018
ER -