The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST

Understand

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a sub-orbital surveying experiment designed to study the evolutionary history and processes of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and galaxies at cosmological distances.

• The BLAST continuum camera, which consists of 270 detectors distributed between 3 arrays, observes simultaneously in broad-band (30%) spectral-windows at 250, 350, and 500 microns.
• The optical design is based on a 2m diameter telescope, providing a diffraction-limited resolution of 30" at 250 microns.
• The gondola pointing system enables raster mapping of arbitrary geometry, with a repeatable positional accuracy of ~30"; post-flight pointing reconstruction to ~5" rms is achieved.