QMAP
Left to right: Tom Herbig, Mark Devlin, Stu Bradley, Amber Miller, Lyman Page and Barth Netterfield on the Palestine launch pad in front of Tiny Tim just before flight 1. Not shown, though who played a major role, are Angelica de Oliveira-Costa (Princeton and IAS) and Max Tegmark (at IAS). In addition, Norm Jarosik built and designed the bi-phase telemetry system. Bill Vinje and Glen Monnelly worked on the HEMT radiometers. Chris Gabel and Andrea Wood worked on electronics. Jed Beach wrote most of the attitude control code.
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The map produced by the experiment. The hot and cold spots are dominated by fluctuations in the CMB. The circular region in the middle was covered by the SK experiment.
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Images Courtesy of the QMAP TeamOverviewThe QMAP balloon experiment was designed to map the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and measure the angular power spectrum on degree scales. QMAP operated in the Ka (∼ 30 GHz) and Q-band (∼ 40 GHz) with six detectors in two polarizations (Ka1 and Ka2; Q1 and Q2; Q3 and Q4), with angular resolution between 0.6° and 0.9°. Data were taken during two flights in 1996, the first (FL1) in June in Palestine, Texas, and the second (FL2) in November in Ft. Sumner, New Mexico. QMAP scanned a 527 square degree region near the North Celestial Pole in a complicated criss-cross pattern chosen to allow a number of internal checks of the integrity of the measurements and enable efficient 1/f -noise removal. (summary adapted from de Oliveira-Costa et al. 1998, arXiv astro-ph/9808045). Experiment Information:
The archived QMAP website can be viewed HERE. |
