The instrument!


Tomographic Ionized carbon intensity Mapping experiment

The TIME-Pilot instrument is being built in the lab at Caltech!

TIME-Pilot instrument (ABOVE). The instrument will be housed in an existing closed-cycle 4 K– 1 K–300 mK cryostat (bottom left), with an enlarged cryogenic volume to allow insertion of the spectrometer stacks and optics (top left). The 32 waveguide grating spectrometers (top center) are assembled into two stacks of 16, they couple the same 1-D linear field on the sky via an array of feedhorns and single-polarization waveguide feeds illuminated through a polarizing grid.  The dispersed light is detected with twelve 2-D arrays of TES bolometers which span the spectrometer stacks (right) with a total of 1931 detectors. The TESes (lower right) are similar to those built at JPL for CMB polarimetry as well as space-borne spectroscopy. Eleven 150 GHz broadband channels view the same sky as the spectrometers via a dichroic filter, and will be used in surveys of the kSZ effect in galaxy clusters. The spectrometers and detectors are cooled with a custom dual-stage 250-mK / 300-mK refrigerator which has been built and tested (bottom, center).

lots and LOTS of DETAILS below....