The South Pole Telescope Blog

Putting a new camera on the telescope means taking the old one off. The SPTsze camera was on the telescope for 5 years, and with it we were able to make an excellent CMB temperature map of 2500 square degrees of the southern sky. Using that data, we've discovered many galaxy clusters, published power spectrum results, and generally accomplished a lot of science. It is an amazing camera, and as excited as we are about the new polarization camera, we're sad to see it go. Thanks to everyone who worked on SPT and the SPTsze camera for 5 great years of observations. Hopefully the new camera will be just as awesome.

The Prime Minister of Norway is visiting the South Pole this week to celebrate the centennial of Amundsen reaching the South Pole on Dec. 14, 1911. Last night the Prime Minister gave a speech in the galley, highlighting how the international science that occurs at the South Pole is an inspiration to the world. He thanked the South Pole community for hosting him, and commented that though a warm welcome and hospitality are always appreciated, it is especially nice at the South Pole.

Today, the Prime Minister and his delegation toured around all the science sectors on cross country skis. They stopped by SPT and toured the Dark Sector Lab, where Brad Benson and Jamie Bock gave tours of SPT and BICEP2.

SPT is getting a new guard ring around the primary mirror to allow a cleaner view of the sky for the new polarization camera. Work has been going on for awhile now, and today the heavy welders started welding the support structure to the telescope. The guard ring will extend the primary mirror so that it measures 12m in diameter, though the illuminated area of the primary will remain on the precision inner part of the primary.

This season we are installing a new camera on the south pole telescope. Summer work at SPT has been going on for the last month, with teams deployed for installing a new guard ring around the primary, modifying the radiation shields in the optics cryostat to accept new filters, and setting up our new DfMUX readout system. They've accomplished a lot so far this summer, and hopefully you'll see some posts from them soon. I arrived at the south pole 2 days ago with the rest of the receiver team (Abby, Brad, and Jason), and our job for this summer is to assemble and test the new receiver. The new receiver is called SPTpol, and it is a polarization sensitive camera with 588 150GHz pixels (1176 TES bolometers) and 192 90 GHz pixels (384 TES bolometers).

The first thing we did upon arriving (after a good night's sleep of course) was head out to the telescope and unpack the focal plane parts that we had hand-carried to pole. Abby, Jason, and I each had a pelican case full of delicate detectors that we hadn't let out of our sight for 5 days. It was a relief to finally get them to the receiver lab where they would be safe. Once unpacked, we decided to test-assemble the focal plane parts that we had with us to ensure that everything fit as expected.





Even though all of the parts had been tested individually, and we had a test cooldown in the states with most of the focal plane parts, this was the first time that we had put all of the final focal plane parts together. Luckily, everything fits as designed and the focal plane looks great so far.





We are due to get the rest of the receiver parts through the cargo system in the next few days, at which point we can start assembling the cryostat and put the focal plane inside. In the meantime, the entire SPT crew continues to work hard on the many other tasks required to deploy the new camera.