Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter RadioSky

Tuesday, 13 September 2022, 16:03   (SFG 1030 / virtual RadioSky)

A new S-Band Foreground Survey with the SKA-MPG Demonstrator Dish

Ferdinand Jünemann, Hans-Rainer Klöckner
MPIfR

Foreground contamination is a long-standing problem in extragalactic observations. This is especially true when searching for weak signals, such as possible imprints of gravitational waves on the B modes of the polarized cosmic microwave background. We will use the new SKA MPG demonstrator dish for an S-band survey of the entire southern sky, aimed at the precise determination of the Galactic foregrounds. The unprecedented bandwidth of 1.75 to 3.5 GHz at full Stokes will allow to fine tune CMB measurements in terms of both total intensity and polarization. The telescope used is a prototype for SKA-MID. Therefore, the performance of the dish is of interest in its own right. During commissioning, we developed a complete software package for scheduling and steering the telescope and processing the data. In this talk, I will discuss the motivation of the survey, explain the process of commissioning the telescope, discuss on plans to set up a robotic observatory, and finally present preliminary results from a first survey observation.