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
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* 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.
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?