activity
20162026
most citedThe Simons Observatory: Science goals and forecasts

1.5k citations · 1.6k across the 19 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

20 papers

astro-ph.CO2026

Lensing in the Blue IV: The First Weak Gravitational Lensing Maps from the Stratosphere

Sayan Saha, Maya Amit, Jacqueline E. McCleary +42

The Super-Pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) completed its science flight in April 2023, obtaining imaging data for 30 galaxy clusters. In this work, we present th…

astro-ph.IM2026

Multi-sensor fusion for fine-guidance and milliarcsecond-level attitude estimation of balloon-borne telescope

Philippe Voyer, Maya Amit, Steven J. Benton +44

Balloon-borne telescopes rely on fine-guidance systems to achieve milliarcsecond image stability despite residual disturbances from the balloon environment. In these systems, the F…

astro-ph.CO2026

Lensing in the Blue III: Weak Lensing Shape Catalogs of 30 Merging Galaxy Clusters

Sayan Saha, Jacqueline E. McCleary, Spencer W. Everett +38

We present the weak gravitational lensing dataset from the Super-pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), which imaged 30 galaxy clusters during its 45 night flight in…

astro-ph.IM2024★ 5 cited

SuperBIT Superpressure Flight Instrument Overview and Performance: Near diffraction-limited Astronomical Imaging from the Stratosphere

Ajay S. Gill, Steven J. Benton, Christopher J. Damaren +26

SuperBIT was a 0.5-meter near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wide-field telescope that launched on a NASA superpressure balloon into the stratosphere from New Zealand for a 45-night…

astro-ph.IM2024★ 1 cited

In-Flight Performance of Spider's 280 GHz Receivers

Elle C. Shaw, P. A. R. Ade, S. Akers +84

SPIDER is a balloon-borne instrument designed to map the cosmic microwave background at degree-angular scales in the presence of Galactic foregrounds. SPIDER has mapped a large sky…

astro-ph.IM2024

From SuperBIT to GigaBIT: Informing next-generation balloon-borne telescope design with Fine Guidance System flight data

Philippe Voyer, Steven J. Benton, Christopher J. Damaren +28

The Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) is a near-diffraction-limited 0.5m telescope that launched via NASA's super-pressure balloon technology on April 16, 2…

astro-ph.GA2024★ 9 cited

Analysis of Polarized Dust Emission Using Data from the First Flight of SPIDER

SPIDER Collaboration, P. A. R. Ade, M. Amiri +67

Using data from the first flight of SPIDER and from Planck HFI, we probe the properties of polarized emission from interstellar dust in the SPIDER observing region. Component separ…

astro-ph.IM2023★ 10 cited

Data downloaded via parachute from a NASA super-pressure balloon

Ellen L. Sirks, Richard Massey, Ajay S. Gill +40

In April to May 2023, the superBIT telescope was lifted to the Earth's stratosphere by a helium-filled super-pressure balloon, to acquire astronomical imaging from above (99.5% of)…

astro-ph.IM2023

Lensing in the Blue II: Estimating the Sensitivity of Stratospheric Balloons to Weak Gravitational Lensing

Jacqueline E. McCleary, Spencer W. Everett, Mohamed M. Shaaban +23

The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) is a diffraction-limited, wide-field, 0.5 m, near-infrared to near-ultraviolet observatory designed to exploit the stra…

astro-ph.IM2022★ 6 cited

Weak lensing in the blue: a counter-intuitive strategy for stratospheric observations

Mohamed M. Shaaban, Ajay S. Gill, Jacqueline McCleary +24

The statistical power of weak lensing measurements is principally driven by the number of high redshift galaxies whose shapes are resolved. Conventional wisdom and physical intuiti…

astro-ph.IM2021★ 1 cited

In-flight gain monitoring of SPIDER's transition-edge sensor arrays

J. P. Filippini, A. E. Gambrel, A. S. Rahlin +67

Experiments deploying large arrays of transition-edge sensors (TESs) often require a robust method to monitor gain variations with minimal loss of observing time. We propose a sens…

astro-ph.CO2021★ 7 cited

A Simulation-Based Method for Correcting Mode Coupling in CMB Angular Power Spectra

J. S. -Y. Leung, J. Hartley, J. M. Nagy +67

Modern CMB analysis pipelines regularly employ complex time-domain filters, beam models, masking, and other techniques during the production of sky maps and their corresponding ang…

astro-ph.CO2021★ 4 cited

The XFaster Power Spectrum and Likelihood Estimator for the Analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background Maps

A. E. Gambrel, A. S. Rahlin, X. Song +64

We present the XFaster analysis package. XFaster is a fast, iterative angular power spectrum estimator based on a diagonal approximation to the quadratic Fisher matrix estimator. X…

astro-ph.CO2021★ 2 cited

A Constraint on Primordial -Modes from the First Flight of the SPIDER Balloon-Borne Telescope

SPIDER Collaboration, P. A. R. Ade, M. Amiri +68

We present the first linear polarization measurements from the 2015 long-duration balloon flight of SPIDER, an experiment designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave b…

astro-ph.IM2020★ 5 cited

Design and pre-flight performance of SPIDER 280 GHz receivers

E. C. Shaw, P. A. R. Ade, S. Akers +79

In this work we describe upgrades to the Spider balloon-borne telescope in preparation for its second flight, currently planned for December 2021. The Spider instrument is optimize…

astro-ph.IM2020★ 9 cited

Optical night sky brightness measurements from the stratosphere

Ajay Gill, Steven J. Benton, Anthony M. Brown +27

This paper presents optical night sky brightness measurements from the stratosphere using CCD images taken with the Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT). The d…

astro-ph.IM2020★ 6 cited

Download by Parachute: Retrieval of Assets from High Altitude Balloons

E. L. Sirks, P. Clark, R. J. Massey +27

We present a publicly-available toolkit of flight-proven hardware and software to retrieve 5 TB of data or small physical samples from a stratospheric balloon platform. Before laun…

astro-ph.IM2019★ 13 cited

Robust diffraction-limited NIR-to-NUV wide-field imaging from stratospheric balloon-borne platforms -- SuperBIT science telescope commissioning flight & performance

L. Javier Romualdez, Steven J. Benton, Anthony M. Brown +26

At a fraction the total cost of an equivalent orbital mission, scientific balloon-borne platforms, operating above 99.7% of the Earth's atmosphere, offer attractive, competitive, a…

astro-ph.CO2018★ 1.5k cited

The Simons Observatory: Science goals and forecasts

The Simons Observatory Collaboration, Peter Ade, James Aguirre +247

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scient…

astro-ph.CO2016★ 13 cited

Marginalized Fisher Forecast for Horndeski Dark Energy Models

Jason S. -Y. Leung, Zhiqi Huang

We use effective field theory (EFT) formalism to forecast the constraint on Horndeski class of dark energy models with future supernova and galaxy surveys. Previously (Gleyzes {\it…