Speaker
Description
The Millimeter Sardinia radio Telescope Receiver based on Array of Lumped elements kids is (MISTRAL) is a novel high resolution, wide field of view millimeter camera currently installed at the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT), a 64 m fully steerable gregorian radio telescope located in Italy. MISTRAL was developed in the framework of the SRT-HighFreq project, funded by a National Operational Program (PON), with the aim to expand the capabilities of the radio telescope in order to cover frequency up to the W band. The 90 GHz sky has been extensively studied by Cosmic Microwave Background experiments, both ground-based (ACT, SPT, and others) and satellite-based (WMAP, Planck). However, their resolution is limited to ~1’ from ground telescopes and ~10’ from satellite. With this new instrument, we aim to observe the microwave sky at a resolution of ~12’’ with a high mapping speed, a capability only shared by few instruments in the world, unlocking the exploration of a plethora of science cases from the recently upgraded SRT. These science cases span from observations of the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect in clusters and other large scale structures in the universe, to galactic science and solar system science.
The heart of MISTRAL is a ~100 mm silicon focal plane populated with 415 cryogenic Lumped Elements Kinetic Inductance Detectors (LEKIDs). These detectors are copuled with the telescope using a cold (4K) re-imaging optical system composed of two silicon lenses, producing a diffraction limited field of view of 4’. The system is enclosed in a custom cryostat, built with strict requirements on its size, in order to fit on the rotating turret that allows to switch the receivers to be quickly moved in and out of the gregorian focus position.
After the successful installation on the telescope in may 2023, MISTRAL started its technical commissioning in the early 2024. In this contribution we will give an overview of the MISTRAL instrument and its subsystems, and report their performances during the technical commissioning phase.
| Would you be interested in presenting a poster if the conference is oversubcribed? | Yes |
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