How accurately can suborbital experiments measure the CMB?

Angelica de Oliveira-Costa; Max Tegmark; Mark Devlin; Lyman Page; Amber Miller; Barth Netterfield; Yongzhong Xu

doi:10.1103/physrevd.71.043004

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arXiv · astro-ph/0406375

How accurately can suborbital experiments measure the CMB?

Angelica de Oliveira-Costa·Max Tegmark·Mark Devlin·Lyman Page·Amber Miller·Barth Netterfield·Yongzhong Xu

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Abstract

Great efforts are currently being channeled into ground- and balloon-based CMB experiments, mainly to explore anisotropy on small angular scales and polarization. To optimize instrumental design and assess experimental prospects, it is important to understand in detail the atmosphere-related systematic errors that limit the science achievable with new suborbital instruments. For this purpose, we spatially compare the 648 square degree ground- and balloon-based QMASK map with the atmosphere-free WMAP map, finding beautiful agreement on all angular scales where both are sensitive. This is a reassuring quantitative assessment of the power of the state-of-the-art FFT- and matrix-based mapmaking techniques that have been used for QMASK and virtually all subsequent experiments.

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Angelica de Oliveira-Costa, Max Tegmark, Mark Devlin, Lyman Page, Amber Miller, Barth Netterfield, Yongzhong Xu. 2004-06-17. How accurately can suborbital experiments measure the CMB?. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.71.043004

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