It's early November--the start of summer at the South Pole, which means a large crew of SPTpol folks are headed down to the pole to start upgrade work on the camera. In fact, our first wave of summer folks arrived at the South Pole yesterday to finish up polarization calibration of the current receiver configuration before we take it apart for upgrades. Special thanks to winterovers Cynthia Chang and Nicholas Huang, who have spent the last 9 months at the South Pole running the telescope, taking data, and fixing any unexpected problems that cropped up. In the next few days (after they hand off telescope duties to the summer crew), they will be headed home for a well-deserved vacation.
We have several upgrades slated for this season. We are changing our observing bands slightly and replacing a subset of detectors to optimize sensitivity, improving the hold time of our cryogenic refrigerator, adding more co-moving ground shields to the telescope, and updating some of our readout so that we have the option of using digital active nulling (DAN) for readout if we want. A group of SPTpol students and post-docs attended SPIE this summer, and we published proceedings discussing the current state of the instrument, as well as the planned instrument upgrades for this summer. If you are interested in the more technical aspects of the receiver (and this summer's upgrades), check out the proceedings below.
Austermann, et al. 2012 -
SPTpol: an instrument for CMB polarization measurements with the South Pole Telescope
de Haan, et al. 2012 -
Improved Performance of TES Bolometers using Digital Feedback
George, et al. 2012 -
Performance and on-sky optical characterization of the SPTpol instrument
Henning, et al. 2012 -
Feedhorn-coupled TES polarimeter camera modules at 150 GHz for CMB polarization measurements with SPTpol
Sayre, et al. 2012 -
Design and characterization of 90 GHz feedhorn-coupled TES polarimeter pixels in the SPTpol camera
Story, et al. 2012 -
South Pole Telescope Software Systems: Control, Monitoring, and Data Acquisition
It's going to be a busy season, but we're all excited about the instrument and the tasks ahead for the summer.
