WIDG Seminar: Lauren Saunders, Yale University, “Telescope Pointing for the Simons Observatory”

The Simons Observatory is a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiment soon to be deployed in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The observatory will consist of three Small Aperture Telescopes designed to search for inflationary B-mode polarization signatures, and one higher-resolution Large Aperture Telescope designed to constrain cosmological parameters including the sum of the neutrino masses, the number of relativistic species, the Hubble constant, dark matter and dark energy. To make meaningful observations, the Simons Observatory must improve telescope systematics beyond any current CMB experiment, which requires robust and up-to-date readout and control systems. I will focus particularly on these systems for the telescope pointing mechanism, which is critical for conducting surveys with the Simons Observatory.
https://yale.zoom.us/j/754440361