**Notes for Jan 17 2018 Telecon**

On the call: Brendan, Maurizio, Shaul, Joy, Enrique

  * PICO workshop early May: two days out of the week of April 30 - May 3, at Minneapolis
    ** a good deadline for finishing the bulk of our work
    ** proposing an hour or so presentation on systematics, plus 1 hour
  * updates on The Big Three
    ** nominal scan strategy information can be found here: https://zzz.physics.umn.edu/ipsig/optimizingscanstrategy/start
    ** Plan for toast runs: PICO focal plane layout not trivial(because not hex-packed), but LBL folks.  Four detectors are no problem.
    ** Gain stability: Maurizio about to get started: similar analysis as done for CORE, sims of dipole observations + sims of gains per detector, use custom mapmaking code to solve for gain drift.  Look at the CORE systematics paper for details + link to source code for simulations (pdf file).
    ** Far Sidelobes: GRASP sims available (see Imager page).  
    ** Absolute Polarization Angle calibration.  Can use analytic solution to look at what happens when we don't solve for absolute polarization angle (by say, minimizing EB and TB).
  * Cubesat calibration concept
    ** original idea proposed for Litebird
    ** some resources coming in a few months for some preliminary engineering work to be done.  This is likely to provide some results on a time scale that is useful to PICO.
    ** will try to generalize for Litebird and PICO in the near term.
    ** proposing to ESA (6 March deadline), building up a consortium for a larger 3 year cubesat project.  Will study the performance gains for a larger mission (e.g. CORE)
    ** The idea: a piggyback satellite that autonomously deploys and positions itself.  Attitude and orbital control are the key issues.
    ** goal is a few kg mass, and cost ~ 1% of total cost of mission.
    ** The idea is to "Calibrate Everything"!  Polarization angle, photometry, main beams, far sidelobes.  
       * Cover wide frequency band: 10's of GHz, 40-400 GHz originally conceived.  
       * Monochromatic tones that can be swept in frequency.
     * Future ESA work will study some key trades, cost, mass, etc., and even possibly look at hardware demos.
   * Do Galactic science need better than 1 degree precision in polarization angle?