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Post Info TOPIC: BLAST balloon


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RE: BLAST balloon
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BLAST's second flight was its first scientific flight. BLAST launched at 1:10 UTC June 12, 2005 from Esrange, near Kiruna, Sweden and landed at 6:15 UTC June 16, 2005 on Victoria Island, Northwest Territories, Canada.
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BLAST is now floating and spinning its way up into the stratosphere.
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Balloon-Borne Large-Aperture Telescope Launched From Antarctica

A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 36 kilometres up. Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation's Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth's southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures submillimetre light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.
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Posts: 131433
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BLAST Flight 615N
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BLAST - Flight 615N - LDB Relayed Real Time GPS Data

Payload position as of:
12:43:09Z 12/27/10

Latitude: 76° 19.78 S
Longitude: 162° 14.90 E
Altitude: 128644 Feet
34.12 Knots @ 310.00°

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RE: BLAST balloon
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Title: The Balloon-Borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) 2005: A 10 deg˛ Survey of Star Formation in Cygnus X
Authors: Arabindo Roy, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Simon R. Dicker, Kevin France, Andrew G. Gibb, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Philip Mauskopf, Jorge L. Morales Ortiz, Calvin B. Netterfield, Alberto Noriega-Crespo, Luca Olmi, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe
(Version, v2)

We present Cygnus X in a new multi-wavelength perspective based on an unbiased BLAST survey at 250, 350, and 500 micron, combined with rich datasets for this well-studied region. Our primary goal is to investigate the early stages of high mass star formation. We have detected 184 compact sources in various stages of evolution across all three BLAST bands. From their well-constrained spectral energy distributions, we obtain the physical properties mass, surface density, bolometric luminosity, and dust temperature. Some of the bright sources reaching 40 K contain well-known compact H II regions. We relate these to other sources at earlier stages of evolution via the energetics as deduced from their position in the luminosity-mass (L-M) diagram. The BLAST spectral coverage, near the peak of the spectral energy distribution of the dust, reveals fainter sources too cool (~ 10 K) to be seen by earlier shorter-wavelength surveys like IRAS. We detect thermal emission from infrared dark clouds and investigate the phenomenon of cold "starless cores" more generally. Spitzer images of these cold sources often show stellar nurseries, but these potential sites for massive star formation are "starless" in the sense that to date there is no massive protostar in a vigorous accretion phase. We discuss evolution in the context of the L-M diagram. Theory raises some interesting possibilities: some cold massive compact sources might never form a cluster containing massive stars; and clusters with massive stars might not have an identifiable compact cold massive precursor.

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Title: The BLAST Survey of the Vela Molecular Cloud: Dynamical Properties of the Dense Cores in Vela-D
Authors: Luca Olmi, Daniel Angles-Alcazar, Massimo De Luca, Davide Elia, Teresa Giannini, Dario Lorenzetti, Fabrizio Massi, Peter G. Martin, Francesco Strafella
(Version v2)

The Vela-D region, according to the nomenclature given by Murphy & May (1991), of the star forming complex known as the Vela Molecular Ridge (VMR), has been recently analysed in details by Olmi et al. (2009), who studied the physical properties of 141 pre- and proto-stellar cold dust cores, detected by the "Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope'' (BLAST) during a much larger (55 sq. degree) Galactic Plane survey encompassing the whole VMR. This survey's primary goal was to identify the coldest, dense dust cores possibly associated with the earliest phases of star formation. In this work, the dynamical state of the Vela-D cores is analysed. Comparison to dynamical masses of a sub-sample of the Vela-D cores estimated from the 13CO survey of Elia et al. (2007), is complicated by the fact that the 13CO linewidths are likely to trace the lower density intercore material, in addition to the dense gas associated with the compact cores observed by BLAST. In fact, the total internal pressure of these cores, if estimated using the 13CO linewidths, appears to be higher than the cloud ambient pressure. If this were the case, then self-gravity and surface pressure would be insufficient to bind these cores and an additional source of external confinement (e.g., magnetic field pressure) would be required. However, if one attempts to scale down the 13CO linewidths, according to the observations of high-density tracers in a small sample of sources, then most proto-stellar cores would result effectively gravitationally bound.

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Title: BLAST Observations of the South Ecliptic Pole field: Number Counts and Source Catalogues
Authors: Elisabetta Valiante, Peter Ade, James Bock, Filiberto Braglia, Edward Chapin, Mark Joseph Devlin, Matthew Griffin, Joshua Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter Hargrave, David Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Philip Mauskopf, Calvin Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Kimberly Scott, Christopher Semisch, Hans Stabenau, Nicholas Thomas, Matthew Truch, Carole Tucker, Gregory Tucker, Marco Viero, Donald Wiebe

We present results from a survey carried out by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) on a 9 deg˛ field near the South Ecliptic Pole at 250, 350 and 500 {\mu}m. The median 1{\sigma} depths of the maps are 36.0, 26.4 and 18.4 mJy, respectively. We apply a statistical method to estimate submillimeter galaxy number counts and find that they are in agreement with other measurements made with the same instrument and with the more recent results from Herschel/SPIRE. Thanks to the large field observed, the new measurements give additional constraints on the bright end of the counts. We identify 132, 89 and 61 sources with S/N>4 at 250, 350, 500 {\mu}m, respectively and provide a multi-wavelength combined catalogue of 232 sources. The new BLAST maps and catalogues are available publicly at this http URL

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BLAST-Pol balloon
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Title: The balloon-borne large-aperture submillimeter telescope for polarimetry: BLAST-Pol
Authors: Laura M. Fissel, Peter A. R. Ade, Francesco E. Angile, Steven J. Benton, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Natalie N. Gandilo, Joshua O. Gundersen, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeffrey Klein, Andrei L. Korotkov, Galen Marsden, Tristan G. Matthews, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Tony K. Mroczkowski, C. Barth Netterfield, Giles Novak, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Giorgio Savini, Douglas Scott, Jamil A. Shariff, Juan Diego Soler, Nicholas E. Thomas, Matthew D. P. Truch, Carole E. Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Derek Ward-Thompson, Donald V. Wiebe

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLAST-Pol) is a suborbital mapping experiment designed to study the role played by magnetic fields in the star formation process. BLAST-Pol is the reconstructed BLAST telescope, with the addition of linear polarisation capability. Using a 1.8 m Cassegrain telescope, BLAST-Pol images the sky onto a focal plane that consists of 280 bolometric detectors in three arrays, observing simultaneously at 250, 350, and 500 um. The diffraction-limited optical system provides a resolution of 30'' at 250 um. The polarimeter consists of photolithographic polarising grids mounted in front of each bolometer/detector array. A rotating 4 K achromatic half-wave plate provides additional polarisation modulation. With its unprecedented mapping speed and resolution, BLAST-Pol will produce three-colour polarisation maps for a large number of molecular clouds. The instrument provides a much needed bridge in spatial coverage between larger-scale, coarse resolution surveys and narrow field of view, and high resolution observations of substructure within molecular cloud cores. The first science flight will be from McMurdo Station, Antarctica in December 2010. .

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Posts: 131433
Date:
RE: BLAST balloon
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Title: The BLAST Survey of the Vela Molecular Cloud: Dynamical Properties of the Dense Cores in Vela-D
Authors: Luca Olmi, Daniel Angles-Alcazar, Massimo De Luca, Davide Elia, Teresa Giannini, Dario Lorenzetti, Fabrizio Massi, Peter G. Martin, Francesco Strafella

The Vela-D region, according to the nomenclature given by Murphy and May (1991), of the star forming complex known as the Vela Molecular Ridge (VMR), has been recently analysed in details by Olmi et al. (2009), who studied the physical properties of 141 pre- and proto-stellar cold dust cores, detected by the "Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope" (BLAST) during a much larger (55 deg˛) Galactic Plane survey encompassing the whole VMR. This survey's primary goal was to identify the coldest, dense dust cores possibly associated with the earliest phases of star formation. In this work, the dynamical state of the Vela-D cores is analysed. Comparison to dynamical masses of a sub-sample of the Vela-D cores estimated from the 13CO survey of Elia et al. (2007), is complicated by the fact that the 13CO linewidths are likely to trace both the lower density intercore material in addition to the dense gas associated with the compact cores observed by BLAST. In fact, the total internal pressure of these cores, if estimated using the 13CO linewidths, appears to be higher than the cloud ambient pressure. If this were the case, then self-gravity and surface pressure would be insufficient to bind these cores and an additional source of external confinement (e.g., magnetic field pressure) would be required. However, if one attempts to scale down the 13CO linewidths, according to the observations of high-density tracers in a small sample of sources, then most proto-stellar cores would result effectively gravitationally bound.

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Posts: 131433
Date:
BLAST
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Title: The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) 2006: Calibration and Flight Performance
Authors: Matthew D. P. Truch, Peter A. R. Ade, James J. Bock, Edward L. Chapin, Mark J. Devlin, Simon R. Dicker, Matthew Griffin, Joshua O. Gundersen, Mark Halpern, Peter C. Hargrave, David H. Hughes, Jeff Klein, Gaelen Marsden, Peter G. Martin, Philip Mauskopf, Lorenzo Moncelsi, Calvin B. Netterfield, Luca Olmi, Enzo Pascale, Guillaume Patanchon, Marie Rex, Douglas Scott, Christopher Semisch, Nicholas E. Thomas, Carole Tucker, Gregory S. Tucker, Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe
(Version v2)

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) operated successfully during a 250-hour flight over Antarctica in December 2006 (BLAST06). As part of the calibration and pointing procedures, the red hypergiant star VY CMa was observed and used as the primary calibrator. Details of the overall BLAST06 calibration procedure are discussed. The 1-sigma absolute calibration is accurate to 10, 12, and 13% at the 250, 350, and 500 micron bands, respectively. The errors are highly correlated between bands resulting in much lower error for the derived shape of the 250-500 micron continuum. The overall pointing error is <5" rms for the 36, 42, and 60" beams. The performance of the optics and pointing systems is discussed.

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