The Sky Polarization Observatory

Abstract

SPOrt is an ASI-funded experiment specifically designed to measure the sky polarization at 22, 32 and 90 GHz, which was selected in 1997 by ESA to be flown on the International Space Station. Starting in 2006 and for at least 18 months, it will be taking direct and simultaneous measurements of the Stokes parameters Q and U at 660 sky pixels, with FWHM=7 degrees. Due to development efforts over the past few years, the design specifications have been significantly improved with respect to the first proposal. Here we present an up-to-date description of the instrument, which now warrants a pixel sensitivity of 1.7 microK for the polarization of the cosmic background radiation, assuming two years of observations. We discuss SPOrt scientific goals in the light of WMAP results, in particular in connection with the emerging double-reionization cosmological scenario.

53 pages, 22 figures, 1 reference replaced

References in corpus (8)

• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters
• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Foreground Emission
• Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) First Year Observations: TE Polarization
• Early Reionization by the First Galaxies
• CRASH: a Radiative Transfer Scheme
• An iterative destriping technique for diffuse background polarization data
• A New approach for a Galactic Synchrotron Polarized Emission Template in the Microwave Range
• Nature of Dark Energy and Polarization Measurements

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Instrument, Method, Brightness and Polarization Maps from the 2003 flight of BOOMERanG
• TRIS I: Absolute Measurements of the Sky Brightness Temperature at 0.6, 0.82 and 2.5 GHz
• TRIS III: the diffuse galactic radio emission at $\delta =+42^{\circ }$
• A coherent polarimeter array for the Large Scale Polarization Explorer balloon experiment
• Antenna Instrumental Polarization and its Effects on E- and B-Modes for CMBP Observations
• A Beginner's Guide to the Theory of CMB Temperature and Polarization Power Spectra in the Line-of-Sight Formalism
• A polarized synchrotron template for CMBP experiments after WMAP data
• Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization and reionization: constraining models with a double reionization
• Constraining the reionization history with large angle CMB polarization
• Systematic effects induced by a flat isotropic dielectric slab
• On beam characterization of ground-based CMB radio telescopes using UAV-mounted sources: application to the QUIJOTE TFGI and plans for LSPE-Strip
• Effects of Thermal Fluctuations in the SPOrt Experiment