The PoGO+ Balloon-Borne Hard X-ray Polarimetry Mission

Abstract

The PoGO mission, including the PoGOLite Pathfinder and PoGO+, aims to provide polarimetric measurements of the Crab system and Cygnus X-1 in the hard X-ray band. Measurements are conducted from a stabilized balloon-borne platform, launched on a 1 million cubic meter balloon from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden to an altitude of approximately 40 km. Several flights have been conducted, resulting in two independent measurements of the Crab polarization and one of Cygnus X-1. Here, a review of the PoGO mission is presented, including a description of the payload and the flight campaigns, and a discussion of some of the scientific results obtained to date.

9 pages, 5 figures, proceedings of the Alsatian Workshop on X-ray Polarimetry (Strasbourg, November 13-15, 2017), published in Special Issue "The Bright Future of Astronomical X-ray Polarimetry"

References in corpus (7)

• Polarization of the Crab pulsar and nebula as observed by the Integral/IBIS telescope
• A Sealed Gas Pixel Detector for X-ray Astronomy
• Direct reading of charge multipliers with a self-triggering CMOS analog chip with 105k pixels at 50 micron pitch
• Optical polarisation of the Crab pulsar: precision measurements and comparison to the radio emission
• Polarization of the Crab Nebula with disordered magnetic components
• Calibration and performance studies of the balloon-borne hard X-ray polarimeter PoGO+
• The PoGO+ view on Crab off-pulse hard X-ray polarisation

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• Deep Ensemble Analysis for Imaging X-ray Polarimetry
• Towards Optimal Signal Extraction for Imaging X-ray Polarimetry
• The RoboPol Program: Optical Polarimetric Monitoring of Blazars
• Consequences of Energetic Magnetar-Like Outbursts of Nearby Neutron Stars: ${}^{14}$C Events and the Cosmic Electron Spectrum
• Hard X-ray Polarimetry -- An overview of the method, science drivers and recent findings
• Neural network analysis of X-ray polarimeter data
• A deep ensemble approach to X-ray polarimetry
• Performance of the X-Calibur Hard X-Ray Polarimetry Mission during its 2018/19 Long-Duration Balloon Flight