The Background Emission Anisotropy Scanning Telescope (BEAST) Instrument Description and Performances

• DOI: 10.1086/429092
• Publication Date: 2005-04-26T19:28:28Z
• Authors: Jeffery Childers; Marco Bersanelli; Newton Figueiredo; Todd C. Gaier; Doron Halevi; Miikka Kangas; Alan Levy; Philip M. Lubin; Marco Malaspina; Nazzareno Mandolesi; Joshua Marvil; Peter R. Meinhold; Jorge Mejia; Paolo Natoli; Hugh O’Neill; Shane Parendo; Michael D. Seiffert; Nathan C. Stebor; Fabrizio Villa; Thyrso Villela; Brian Williams; Carlos Alexandre ...
• Keywords: Refracting telescope

The Background Emission Anisotropy Scanning Telescope (BEAST) is a millimeter wavelength experiment designed to generate maps of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). telescope composed an off-axis Gregorian optical system with 2.2 m primary that focuses collected radiation onto array cryogenically cooled high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) receivers. This six corrugated scalar feed horns Q band (38 45 GHz) and two more Ka (26 36 one Q-band connected ortho-mode transducer for extraction both polarizations incident on single feed. has minimum beam size 20' average sensitivity 900 μK per receiver. paper describes design performance BEAST instrument provides details subsystems developed used toward goal generating map CMB scales l space between ∼ 100 500. A centered north celestial pole been generated from 9° wide annulus at declination 37° typical pixel error 57 ± 5 when smoothed 30' resolution. brief summary results by observing campaign University California White Mountain Research Station are also included.