2008/05/31 by G. Marsden, P. A. R. Ade, S. Benton +55 · 18 citations
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Balloon #Geology #Medicine #Optics #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Remote sensing #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Superconducting and THz Device Technology #Telescope #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1117/12.788413
published in Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE 7020, 702002 (SPIE) · SPIE Conference Proceedings
openalex publication_date 2008/06/10 · arxiv created 2008/09/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a sub-orbital experiment designed to study the process of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and in galaxies at cosmological distances. Using a 2m Cassegrain telescope, BLAST images the sky onto a focal plane, which consists of 270 bolometric detectors split between three arrays, observing simultaneously in 30% wide bands, centered at 250, 350, and 500 μm. The diffraction-limited optical system provides a resolution of 30" at 250 μm. The pointing system enables raster-like scans with a positional accuracy of ~30", reconstructed to better than 5" rms in postflight analysis. BLAST had two successful flights, from the Arctic in 2005, and from Antarctica in 2006, which provided the first high-resolution and large-area (~0.8−200 deg<sup>2</sup>) submillimeter surveys at these wavelengths. As a pathfinder for the SPIRE instrument on <i>Herschel</i>, BLAST shares with the ESA satellite similar focal plane technology and scientific motivation. A third flight in 2009 will see the instrument modified to be polarization-sensitive (BLAST-pol). With its unprecedented mapping speed and resolution, BLAST-pol will provide insights into Galactic star-forming nurseries, and give the necessary link between the larger, coarse resolution surveys and the narrow, resolved observations of star-forming structures from space and ground based instruments being commissioned in the next 5 years.