Jessie L. Dotson

FAR-INFRARED POLARIMETRY OF GALACTIC CLOUDS FROM THE KUIPER AIRBORNE OBSERVATORY

In this paper we present a complete summary of the data obtained with the far-infrared polarimeter, Stokes, in flights of the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. We have observed 12 Galactic clouds and have made over 1100 individual measurements at 100 ?m and 60 ?m. The median P for all of the 60 ?m and 100 ?m measurements is 3.6% and 2.6% respectively. We also present flux maps obtained simultaneously with the polarimetry.

Design and assembly of a stressed Ge:Ga photoconductor array for AIRES

In this paper we present the considerations for design and assembly of a stressed gallium doped germanium photoconductor array for the Airborne InfraRed Echelle Spectrometer on SOFIA. This 8 X 12 element array will cover the wavelength range from 125 to 210 micrometers . The considerations cover the aspects of the mechanical design for stressing the detectors in a uniform way, assembly of the components, contacting them electrically with minimized stray capacitance, and the layout of the light collecting cone assembly.

The primordial inflation polarization explorer (PIPER): current status and performance of the first flight (Conference Presentation)

The Primordial Inflation Polarization ExploreR (PIPER) is a balloon-borne instrument optimized to measure the polarization of the CMB at large angular scales. It will map 85% of the sky over a series of conventional balloon flights from the Northern and Southern hemispheres, measuring the B-mode polarization power spectrum over a range of multipoles from 2-300 covering both the reionization bump and the recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007. PIPER will observe in four frequency bands centered at 200, 270, 350, and 600 GHz to characterize dust foregrounds. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.7 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto kilo-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 100 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs). PIPER had its engineering ight in October 2017 from Fort Sumner, New Mexico. This papers outlines the major components in the PIPER system discussing the conceptual design as well as specific choices made for PIPER. We also report on the results of the engineering flight, looking at the functionality of the payload systems, particularly VPM, as well as pointing out areas of improvement.

16x24 germanium photoconductor array for AIRES

We have designed and prototyped an array of Ge:Sb photoconductors for use in AIRES, the Airborne InfraRed Echelle Spectrometer, on SOFIA. The 16 X 24 flight array will operate between 33 micrometers and 120 micrometers . In this paper we discuss the testing of a 3 X 3 prototype array and the resulting design of the flight array.