Implementation and Analysis of the 2009 Engineering Flight
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The E and B EXperiment: Implementation and Analysis of the 2009 Engineering Flight A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Michael Bryce Milligan IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy Shaul Hanany May, 2011 c Michael Bryce Milligan 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Acknowledgements There are many people who have earned my lasting gratitude over the past (too many) years. To compile an exhaustive list would be both tedious and inevitably uncharitable to those I fail to mention. Forgive me, then, if I stick to generalities except for those few cases who, perhaps, don't know who they are. The EBEX project itself is a collaboration of dozens of individuals, without whom this wonderful contraption we have built could not exist. I have been delighted to call them colleagues and friends, and I especially tip my hat to those of you who shared with me the ups and downs of our field campaigns in Nevis, NY, Ft. Sumner, NM, and Palestine, TX. And behind all of us, I recognize the family and friends who cheer on our successes, lighten the setbacks, and tolerate the strange hours and long absences that come with experimental astrophysics. Not least my own family and friends, who never seem to give up on me even when I quite shamefully neglect them! I appreciate all the people who have been guideposts on the path that led me here. Early on, Moises Sandoval and later Jim Fraser nurtured in me a taste for doing an experiment to untangle the nature of the world. Also: the raft of educators who put up with my prodigious need to know things; the many people who make possible school, regional, and larger science fairs; everyone who, in the early years of personal computers, let me poke about and explore theirs. Thanks to the Meyer group at the University of Chicago for introducing me to TopHat and my first peek at scientific ballooning, and to the GriPhyN project collaborators, especially James Annis at FNAL, for showing me around the world of high performance computing. The past eight years have been trying at times, so many thanks to the people who helped keep it fun, especially: Jeff Knoll, a marvelously undemanding roommate; Miriam Quintal and other residents of Beit Clore, who kept me company for a year in i a distant land; the Judges and participants over the years of the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, the other really long-running game in my life; my fellow graduate students in the astronomy program. EBEX is principally funded by NASA, and the staff of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility have energetically supported us throughout. I have personally received support from the Minnesota Space Grant Foundation. Our colleagues in the BLAST project originally developed important parts of the core flight hardware and software we use. We acutely feel the loss of our late colleague Huan Tran. ii Dedication For the sheer pleasure of finding things out. iii Abstract The E and B EXperiment (EBEX) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and emission from galactic dust at millimeter wavelengths from 150 to 410 GHz. The primary science objectives of EBEX are to: detect or constrain the primordial B-mode polarization of the CMB predicted by inflationary cosmology; measure the CMB B-mode signal induced by grav- itational lensing; and characterize the polarized thermal emission from interstellar dust. EBEX will observe a 420 square degree patch of the sky at high galactic latitude with a telescope and camera that provide an 80 beam at three observing bands (150, 250, and 410 GHz) and a 6:2◦ diffraction limited field of view to two large-format bolometer array focal planes. Polarimetry is achieved via a continuously rotating half-wave plate (HWP), and the optical system is designed from the ground up for control of sidelobe response and polarization systematic errors. EBEX is intended to execute fly or more Antarctic long duration balloon cam- paigns. In June 2009 EBEX completed a North American engineering flight launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility (CSBF) in Ft. Sumner, NM and operated in the stratosphere above 30 km altitude for ∼ 10 hours. During flight EBEX must be largely autonomous as it conducts pointed, sched- uled observations; tunes and operates 1432 TES bolometers via 28 embedded Digital frequency-domain multiplexing (DfMux) computers; logs over 3 GiB/hour of science and housekeeping data to onboard redundant disk storage arrays; manages and dispatches jobs over a fault-tolerant onboard Ethernet network; and feeds a complex real-time data processing infrastructure on the ground via satellite and line-of-sight (LOS) downlinks. In this thesis we review the EBEX instrument, present the optical design and the computational architecture for in-flight control and data handling, and the quick-look software stack. Finally we describe the 2009 North American test flight and present analysis of data collected at the end of that flight that characterizes scan-synchronous signals and the expected response to emission from thermal dust in our galaxy. iv Contents Acknowledgements i Dedication iii Abstract iv List of Tables ix List of Figures x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Science overview . .2 1.2 Scope of this Work . .2 2 Overview of the EBEX Instrument 4 2.1 Science Goals . .4 2.2 Experimental Approach . .5 2.2.1 Sensitivity . .6 2.2.2 Foreground Subtraction . .6 2.2.3 Systematic Error Mitigation . .6 2.3 Instrument Overview . .7 3 The EBEX North American Engineering Test Flight 9 3.1 Overview . .9 3.2 Timeline of the Flight . 11 v 4 EBEX Telescope Optical Design and Analysis 16 4.1 Design Constraints . 17 4.1.1 Frequency bands . 17 4.1.2 8 arcmin beam size . 18 4.1.3 Low sidelobe contamination . 18 4.1.4 Flat, telecentric focal plane . 18 4.1.5 Polarizing grid at 45◦ and two focal planes . 18 4.1.6 Large, diffraction limited field of view . 19 4.1.7 Good polarization performance . 19 4.2 EBEX Optical Design . 19 4.2.1 Warm Optics: Telescope . 20 4.2.2 Mizuguchi-Dragone Condition . 22 4.2.3 Cold Optics: Reimaging Camera . 22 4.3 Baffles and Sidelobe Rejection . 26 4.3.1 EBEX Sidelobe Model . 26 4.3.2 Load from Absorptive Baffles . 28 4.3.3 Reflective Baffles . 28 4.3.4 Polarized Sources . 29 4.3.5 Reflective Polarization . 30 4.3.6 Total Contibution . 30 4.4 Broadband Anti-reflective Coatings . 31 4.4.1 Differential Reflection . 31 4.4.2 Instrumental Polarization Model . 31 4.4.3 Optimized Broadband ARC . 32 5 Software and Cyberinfrastructure Supporting EBEX in Flight 34 5.1 Computing and system control requirements . 34 5.2 Subsystems overview . 36 5.3 Flight control program { fcp ......................... 38 5.4 Distributed networked bolometer readout architecture . 40 5.5 ATAoE onboard storage . 43 5.6 Downlink and data logging . 43 vi 5.7 Ground tools and architecture . 46 5.7.1 BLAST-derived telemetry chain . 46 5.7.2 Alignment and interpolation tools . 46 5.7.3 Visualization tools . 47 5.7.4 Networked operations . 49 5.8 Summary . 50 6 North American Dipole Scan Analysis 51 6.1 NA Flight Dipole Scan . 52 6.1.1 Reconstructed Pointing . 52 6.1.2 Microwave Sky Flux Model . 54 6.1.3 Astronomical Context . 56 6.1.4 Flux Timestream . 59 6.1.5 Azimuth binning and simulated timestreams . 61 6.2 HWP Template Removal . 63 6.2.1 Review of HWP Polarimetry . 63 6.2.2 HWP Template Fitting . 64 6.2.3 Template Removal Algorithm . 66 6.3 Narrow Line Noise . 70 6.4 Bolometer Selection and Data Cuts . 73 6.4.1 Selecting bolometers . 73 6.4.2 Data restriction: time and frequency domain . 78 6.5 Scan-Synchronous Signal . 79 6.5.1 Azimuth template removal . 84 6.6 Co-addition and Noise Tests . 84 6.7 Comparing Data to Simulation . 88 6.8 Conclusion . 95 References 98 Appendix A. Correlation of EBEX and DGPS Time via E-bus Frame Timestamps 109 A.1 Overview . 109 vii A.2 E-bus frames . 110 A.3 Problem Definition . 111 A.4 Statistical Solution . 112 A.5 Robustness . 113 A.6 Result . 115 Appendix B. Antenna Sensitivity Formalism 116 Appendix C. FFTs and the Periodogram in Python 118 C.1 Definition: Discrete Fourier Transform . 118 C.2 The Periodogram . 119 C.2.1 Power Spectral Density defined . 119 C.2.2 Time integral squared amplitude . 119 C.2.3 Discrete periodogram estimator . 120 C.3 Windowing . 120 C.4 Implementation . 121 C.4.1 Periodogram with Reduced Variance . 122 C.4.2 Python's FFT . 123 Appendix D. Implementation of the SFD Dust Model 124 viii List of Tables 3.1 Timeline of the test flight . 15 4.1 Optical parameters of EBEX Gregorian telescope . 20 4.2 Edge tapers at the aperture stop . 24 4.3 Sidelobe response model components . 28 4.4 Instrumental polarization and ARCs . 32 4.5 Instrumental polarization and ARCs . 33 5.1 Flight computer restarts . 40 6.1 ok250 bolometers . 75 6.2 ok410 bolometers . 76 6.3 Eccosorb plugged bolometers . 77 6.4 Observing bandwidths and AΩs....................... 77 A.1 Monte Carlo regression variances . 115 ix List of Figures 2.1 Polarization power spectra . ..