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?