A CubeSat for Calibrating Ground-Based and Sub-Orbital Millimeter-Wave Polarimeters (CalSat)

Understand

We describe a low-cost, open-access, CubeSat-based calibration instrument that is designed to support ground-based and sub-orbital experiments searching for various polarization signals in the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

• All modern CMB polarization experiments require a robust calibration program that will allow the effects of instrument-induced signals to be mitigated during data analysis.
• A bright, compact, and linearly polarized astrophysical source with polarization properties known to adequate precision does not exist.
• Therefore, we designed a space-based millimeter-wave calibration instrument, called CalSat, to serve as an open-access calibrator, and this paper describes the results of our design study.