Images of our site via drone (Credit: Gabriele Coppi, Rolando Dunner, Federico Nati, Matias Rojas)
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SAT UHF has officially touched down onto its platform! We now have 3 SATs on their platforms!
Congratulations to the SAT UHF team, the site team, and so many more. 🌟
Congratulations to the SAT UHF team, the site team, and so many more. 🌟
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🚨HUGE milestone🚨
The Large Aperture Telescope Receiver has made it into the Large Aperture Telescope!!!!
Video Credit: Jullianna Denes Couto
The Large Aperture Telescope Receiver has made it into the Large Aperture Telescope!!!!
Video Credit: Jullianna Denes Couto
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SO sits at 5200m, but for our scientists the sky is the limit! The LATR team summited Cerro Toco yesterday 🗻
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So excited to see the LATR safely in the high bay in Chile, great work by the LATR team and the site team!
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Polarization testing going well!
Bryce Bixler, Joe Siebert and JB Lloyd @ucsdcosmology completed the first rounds of tests. On to analysis and final validations!
Bryce Bixler, Joe Siebert and JB Lloyd @ucsdcosmology completed the first rounds of tests. On to analysis and final validations!
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This is a very exciting day for @SimonsObs, the white container pictured contains the receiver for our large aperture telescope, and it's sitting at our site! Great job by the many many SO scientists that worked so hard to get it here. Now the sky is the limit!
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Check out this amazing aerial footage from @daniel992010 of the Large Aperture Telescope, being assembled and tested in Germany as we speak!
youtube.com/watch?v=HOOjVk…
youtube.com/watch?v=HOOjVk…
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Our first scan tests are underway for the Large Aperture Telescope! Our first tests will move in azimuth 🔭
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Where should we look first? Pointing validation tests are underway for the Large Aperture Telescope in Germany
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“Holy moly!” The LAT pointing straight down for the first time ever, an important milestone in the telescope’s validation
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But how to move all those big boxes around? How about a very big crane! (Or at least large for a remote site at 17,000 feet)
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And an aerial view of the site from #teamdrone showing a number of those trucks setting up to offload parts in the lead up to installation!
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Several of those big trucks traversing the site, ended up being a bit of a parade throughout the day.
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A little morning traffic jam on the way to the plateau. This is the convoy of personnel and equipment to kick off the SAT platform installation.
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Busy week at site, German crew installing the Small Aperture Telescopes' pointing platforms + a crew filming it. Also a team testing a drone calibrator with our neighbors @CLASS_telescope (future use with the SATs!). Here's the last image we'll see of empty SAT foundations!
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Fun fact about working up on Cerro Toco, just past the turnoff from the highway to the site there is a colony of Viscachas, rather cute animals native to the Atacama. Here are two of them catching some rays in the morning.
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Family portrait on the plateau. SO LAT and SO SAT foundations up front with @ACT_Pol, @CLASS_telescope, and Simons Array from left to right. The peak behind the telescopes is Cerro Toco. #science #telescopes #precisioncosmology
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This week live from San Pedro de Atacama, @AstroDrNick will give updates of site work and the drone cal project he's working on. First, work at 17,000 feet uses a lot of energy, left, dinner at RadioSky w the SO site team, right, breakfast w film team and other collaborators.
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Measuring LAT mirror panel RMS at Vertex in Germany with a @FARO_TechInc makes us smile as much as it does @Penn grad student Anna Kofman
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Is it a barn? Is it a plane? No! It's the bottom of the Large Aperture Telescope elevation structure, sitting upside down! Photo and barn comparison courtesy of @MLimon
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Throwback photos from before the holidays when Zach and @_benkeller were working in the lab @Cornell, getting a dilution refrigerator ready to test some components for the @SimonsObs!
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We're moving the LATR into a new @Penn highbay! Professor Mark Devlin looks on as the LATR is loaded on the a flatbed
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Continued progress at Vertex in Germany where the SAT platforms are being assembled and tested prior to heading to Chile. Very exciting to see all three in the same room! (A couple people are by the one at right for scale)
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For today's unthinkable science horror, @CodyJDuell unplugged the mystery cable and now his data is all nonsensical! Ahhh!!
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In the first bit of frightfulness, @EveVavagiakis
is trying to assemble parts for the cryostat, but all of her metric allen keys have been swapped for imperial! Eek!
is trying to assemble parts for the cryostat, but all of her metric allen keys have been swapped for imperial! Eek!
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And the good news is that our most recent and realistic tests (solid) agree well with our previous, idealized predictions (dashed). (4/4)
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This novel multitracer approach significantly boosts our ability to delens, and should let us remove close to 70% of the lensing B-mode power (in the plot, solid and dashed lines show baseline and goal noise scenarios, respectively). (3/4)
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New paper out! 🎉
We introduce and validate a framework to delens SO B-mode polarization data. This will improve constraints on the amplitude of inflationary gravitational waves (typically parametrized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio r) by reducing the lensing noise. (1/4)
We introduce and validate a framework to delens SO B-mode polarization data. This will improve constraints on the amplitude of inflationary gravitational waves (typically parametrized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio r) by reducing the lensing noise. (1/4)
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It's been a busy week here at @ucsdcosmology so we've been a bit slow posting updates on progress with SAT-MF1. In lieu of that, here's wishing everyone a happy Friday and relaxing weekend from your friends and colleagues in San Diego. - From the desk of @AstroDrNick
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An exciting time for us @CornellPhysics as we cool down our first SO universal focal-plane module (UFM)! These modules contain the optical couplings, detector arrays, and cold readout components for our small and large aperture telescopes: arxiv.org/abs/2106.14797
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Grad students at Cornell tackled everyone’s favorite task today: replacing the wire bonder tool! @_benkeller
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Kaylah McGowan @kbversace was a Scholar in the 2021 Simons-NSBP Scholars Program. She worked with a team at Cornell, looking at the noise power spectrum in ACT CMB temperature maps! youtube.com/watch?v=vJmh9L…
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Tanah Bua was a Scholar in the 2021 Simons-NSBP Scholars Program! She worked with a team at UCSD characterizing noise in the SAT readout. This week Tanah visited the lab for the first time! You can see her describer her work here: youtube.com/watch?v=6_u3A7…
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There are also some SAT temperatures we don't control. The thermometers on our filters couple to the lab temp, which is basically the outside temp, because San Diego. As such, our filters are good indicators of the weather on campus, looks like its getting cooler this week!
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All the recent progress on the SAT is very exciting, though you wouldn't guess it from our optics and detector temperatures over the last five days. We use an active feedback system to keep our temperatures stable to make a nice controlled testing environment inside the camera!
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Coming from UCSD this week with @AstroDrNick , the latest on the first SAT. We are currently at our base temperature of 100mK with a whole bunch of components on our focal plane including a full detector wafer, two test pixel boxes, and a coherent receiver for optical tests!
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.@AstroDrNick of the Simons Observatory and @Science_ing shows off one of our telescopes with some awesome graphics youtube.com/watch?v=fXwKKO…
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‼‼ MAJOR MILESTONE ALERT ‼‼ The LATR team @Penn just completed installation of all seven optics tubes! Check out this awesome time-lapse of a bird's eye view!!
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The 2021 edition of the @SimonsFdn-@NSBPInc program is about to start on June 14. In preparation for the event, here's the program finale from last year: youtube.com/watch?v=0Ds5fH….
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Ok, does anybody else name their lab equipment? For example, at @Penn we named one of our optics tube assembly stands "Blackbeard"
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Another month, another cooldown for the LATR at @Penn. Here, postdoc Jeff Iuliano installs a new readout harness that will be used to relay detector signals!
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And I couldn't help but share this little artistic gem from our graduate student Michael for the cover to the 'universal readout harness' which routes all our readout cabling into the camera. Don't know how I got this far without knowing what #CMB actually stood for! #clubhighbay
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And of course I can't resist a couple glamour shots of SAT-MF1 in #clubhighbay from earlier this week. We've been at base temperature (~100mK) for over a month now and have a couple more weeks worth of testing to go! #SATMF1
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Real exciting news this week, optically coupled pixels in our test cryostat, K-2SO. Seen here is a chopped thermal source below the window of the cryostat that we use to understand the detector's response to different input powers.
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Here's a fantastic plot with an abstract art vibe to it, from grad student Jack Lashner, of a calibration test to see how well an accelerometer coupled to a vibration device called the 'Buttkicker' (thebuttkicker.com/buttkicker-lfe/) for when gaming meets cosmology. #labhacks #clubhighbay
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First, a quick look at where we keep our SMURFs, the custom readout hardware from SLAC that records data from our detectors. We got a new electronics box a few weeks back, always exciting! 'RF shielding' courtesy #precisioncosmology #clubhighbay
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A rough estimate of the data rate from all of our detectors is about 39 MB/s, or 312 Mbps, which is about 12 times the 25 Mbps recommended for 4K streaming from your favorite online streaming platform! @BrianJKoopman is making sure we can handle that many movies at once.
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In order to read out detectors in 13 optics tubes (OT), the LATR requires a large coaxial organization system. The team at @Penn as spent the last couple days installing this coax "highway", as they prepare for the next cooldown.
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Grad student Anna Kofman finishes closing up one of the three optics tubes (OT) that will be installed in the LATR for it's next cooldown at @Penn. This specific OT contains the full readout chain along with small detector packages for dark testing.
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Yesterday at @Penn, we installed a new universal readout harness (URH) into the LATR. The URH bridges our readout chain from 300K to 4K, for 21 channels.
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It was a big day at @Penn on Friday, when the LATR team successfully lifted the cryostat off of it's mount for the first time since fabrication. This important test of grad student Ningfeng Zhu's design will serve as a blueprint for the installation in the telescope.
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Our site team couldn't help but get in on the fun. Check out the latest developments on the foundation pours with close oversight from @SenSanders .
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One last post this week from the desk of @AstroDrNick , his desk! Or at least his WFH setup. If anyone has wondered why he's looking wide eyed to his right, it's because he uses his TV as a second monitor. Really helps those deep dives into the CAD model! #WFH #PrecisionCosmology
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Finally, the low-frequency SAT is currently taking a side-journey at UChicago to test components for the SO LATR. The camera is fully integrated for that purpose, it has achieved base temperature and demonstrated its readout system is working with optical testing coming soon!
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Our high-frequency SAT is undergoing testing at Princeton and recently reached its base temperature of 100mK!
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The second mid-frequency SAT is at UCBerkeley/LBNL with its cryogenic systems being integrated currently.
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The first mid-frequency is at UCSD and is furthest along, with prototype detectors being tested and the optical system ready to be integrated. #CMBeastieBoys #BRock
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Long story short, with the minor addition of a saltwater marsh at the telescope site, our flamingo vision could be realized and we'd have wonderful flamingos to scale in all our pictures of the telescopes! #IfYouBuildItTheyWillCome #Flamingoscopes
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Quick aside, not to be confused with Flaming Go's of which we have seen none in Chile thus far. #BadPuns #SorryNotSorry
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In fact there are quite a few flamingos in close proximity to our telescope as this very scientific figure shows. #science #precisionFlamingology
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Now some people might be surprised at this, "flamingos? in the Atacama Desert?" I too was surprised! But indeed, check your local wiki and you will see this is right in their habitat. In fact here is a photo @AstroDrNick took the last time he was in Chile. #ChileanFlamingos
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Lucky for us @AstroDrNick has been hard at "work" to remedy this situation! Introducing the Flamingo Army! Also 1m tall on a 1m x 1m grid, for scale and such in front of the array of the three SO small aperture telescopes. #flamingos #toscale #precisioncosmology
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So previously @AstroDrNick has released this delightful image of an army of 1m tall penguins in a 1m x 1m formation as a very important reference scale for very official SO figures #penguins #toscale #science #precisioncosmology
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Coming to you this week from UCSD where one of our fantastic grad students brought a little cheer to the SAT-1 lab with a mini tree. Santa even stopped by with socks for everyone in the lab!
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Ciao all! This week, we'll be posting from Ferrara, Italy. In the picture, the gorgeous Ferrara castle at night in the fog...so F'rara!
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We're doing some of our first dark detectors tests in the LATR at @Penn this week! Pictured is the Single Pixel Box and Single Mux Box on the Optics Tube 100mK stage!
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Who's ready for the weekend? The first small aperture telescope platform certainly is! It completed factory acceptance tests (FATs, actual acronym...) earlier this week in Germany. Gif is 10x speed. Next stop? Chile! #science #precisioncosmology #telescopes #astronomy
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