A new optical setup, based on the substitution of the secondary and tertiary mirror (M2-M3), will be installed during the Dome C Summer Campaign 2023-2024. These new optics (f/12) have been designed together with the MiR Optomechanical Engineering. The need for a faster focal ratio has been pointed out from the beginning of the activities and moreover after the end of AMICA instrument...
Cryoscope is a 1m scale infrared surveyor planned to carry out transient astronomy and gravitational wave follow up from Dome C. A quarter-size pathfinder is finishing contruction at Caltech and is planned for deployemnt at Dome C to carry out an early survey and retire technical risks of the full sized telescope.
In 2018, the Greenland Telescope (GLT) started scientific observation in Greenland. Since then, we have completed several significant improvements and added new capabilities to the telescope system. This paper presents a full review of the GLT system, a summary of our observation activities since 2018, the lessons learned from the operations in the Arctic regions, and the prospect of the telescope.
Dome A, Antarctica is expected as the best site on earth for infrared observations, due to its cold atmosphere and excellent seeing. We have built two small telescopes as a pathfinder for infrared astronomy at Dome A. The telescopes have diameters of 15 cm, with fields of view of 1.2 square degrees. They are equipped with commercial InGaAs cameras and J/H filters, respectively. They have been...
The optical properties of dust are central to a wide class of astrophysical objects and the interpretation and modeling of observations, the study of protoplanetary disks being just one example. The development of infrared (IR) astronomy, including observations from Antarctica, will produce a huge amount of data from micron-sized dust, with important implications for radiative transfer...
The 39th CHINARE returned to Dome A after four years. We maintained the site testing instruments, including seeing monitor KL-DIMM, all-sky camera KLCAM, and multi-layer weather station KLAWS-2G. PLATO-A and the main control and data system for instruments were also serviced. All the unattended instruments are working well and collecting data. We will summarize the field work related to...
The astronomical seeing is caused by atmospheric turbulence, which is concentrated on the boundary layer. The boundary layer could hardly be avoided even at the best mid-latitude sites, because it is as thick as hundreds of meters from the ground. However, the boundary layer at Dome A, Antarctica could be as thin as ten meters, therefore excellent seeing around 0.3 arcsec is possible to be...
Artist Tristan Duke will share work from his ongoing interdisciplinary, research-based project Glacial Optics. In 2022 the artist undertook an expedition to the arctic where he made functioning camera lenses out of glacier ice, capturing portraits of the glaciers through their own ice. Subsequently the artist has worked with the NSF Ice Core facility and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle...
This study focuses on neutron monitors (NMs), which are detectors used to measure the flux of high-energy cosmic ray neutrons. The standard NM64 design consists of a reflector, lead rings, a moderator, and a proportional counter filled with boron-10 gas. NMs play a crucial role in studying cosmic rays, their impact on Earth's atmosphere, and space weather. The Changvan neutron monitor...
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles originating from space, such as the sun, supernova explosions of stars, and other presently unknown sources. The processes governing their formation are not fully understood. The propagation of these particles in the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere is influenced by magnetic fields. By monitoring variations and fluctuations in cosmic ray intensity, we...
The Antarctica solar coronagraph –AntarctiCor– for the “Extreme Solar Coronagraphy Antarctic Program Experiment” –ESCAPE– comprises an internally-occulted coronagraph based on the externally-occulted ASPIICS space coronagraph for the ESA formation-flying PROBA-3 mission to be launched in 2024.
This presentation describes the AntarctiCor optical design for ground-based observations of the...
The polar regions have an established history of usage for radio frequency ground stations, offering favourable orbital dynamics for linking with the increasingly large amount of satellites in polar orbits. These dynamics, combined with favourable atmospheric conditions for optics, suggests the Antarctic continent is an excellent location for an optical ground station. We conduct a large...
Measurement of the polarized Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over the past few decades has enabled precision probes of the evolutionary history, composition, and dynamics of the primordial Universe. Next-generation CMB experiments will extend this scientific reach, allowing for tests of the inflationary theory of the early Universe, driven through constraints on the tensor-scalar ratio "r"...
The University of Oslo in Norway has a long tradition in space science research. It started with Kristian Birkeland, one of the pioneers within auroral research, who established first observatories in Northern Norway, on Svalbard and Novaya Zemlaya.
Today, we have participated in large space missions, such as Rosetta, Cluster, BepoColombo, we send our instruments on satellites, launch...
The spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is remarkably close to a 2.725K blackbody. However, small deviations are expected, due to several interesting pre- and post- recombination phenomena. Here we describe an instrument, the COSmic Monopole Observer (COSMO), aimed at measuring the largest spectral distortion in the 100-300 GHz range using a cryogenic Differential Fourier...
The South Pole provides one of the most pristine sites on Earth for observations of the microwave sky, enabling studies of a host of astrophysical and cosmological phenomena. The South Pole Telescope (SPT), online at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station since 2007, takes advantage of the stable desert climate to image the sky with unprecedented sensitivity. The third-generation camera, SPT-3G,...
The theory of cosmological inflation was developed in response to longstanding questions about the origins of our universe. It predicts a specific spectrum of density perturbations that arose during the Big Bang, which has been corroborated by observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This talk will focus on a decisive prediction of inflation that has so far eluded observational...
SPIDER is a balloon-borne CMB polarimeter that has measured 4.8% of the sky with degree-scale angular resolution. Launching from McMurdo, Antarctica, we benefit from the high altitude and long flights achievable from NASA’s Long Duration Balloon facility, which provides access to space-like observing conditions. Using the data from our first flight in 2015, SPIDER published a constraint on...
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons crossing galaxy clusters
can be scattered by hot electrons in the ionized intracluster medium
(ICM). This results in a small change of the spectrum of the CMB in
the direction of clusters of galaxies. The spectrum of the effect is
characteristic, with a brightness decrease at f < 217 GHz and an
increase at f > 217 GHz, independent of the redshift...
Solaris is a scientific and technological project aimed at the development of a smart Solar monitoring system at high radio frequencies based on single-dish imaging techniques (https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/solaris). It combines the implementation of dedicated and interchangeable high-frequency receivers on existing small single-dish radio telescope systems (1.5/2.6m class) available in our...
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector built into the deep glacial ice at the geographic South Pole. Using an array of optical sensors, IceCube detects the Cherenkov light emitted by secondary charged particles produced by neutrino interactions. Following the initial discovery of a diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux a decade ago, recent searches have also...
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer array of 5160 photosensors instrumenting the deep, glacial ice at the geographic South Pole. It detects Cherenkov light emitted by charged particles resulting from neutrino interactions. The spatial and temporal distributions of light in the detector allow to infer the energies and directions of the original neutrinos. As the detector...
The Radio Neutrino Observatory - Greenland (RNO-G) is currently under construction in proximity of Summit Station, 3216 m above sea level.
The observatory consists of an array of independent stations, each including both a deep component (with fifteen vertically and horizontally polarized antennas in three 100m-deep boreholes, configured partially as a phased array trigger) and a shallow...
The IceCube Observatory at the South Pole has detected high energy neutrinos of cosmic origin, including point sources and unresolved Galactic and extragalactic source populations. The extensions to IceCube include the fully funded and under construction low energy, finely segmented extension of the detector (IceCube Upgrade) and a future high energy, high statistics next generation telescope...
AGATA – A new SCAR Programme Planning Group
Lucilla Alfonsi (INGV, Italy) Nicolas Bergeot (ROB, Belgium)
The Antarctic Geospace and ATmosphere reseArch (AGATA) Programme Planning Group is a coordinated, worldwide effort to monitor, investigate and better understand the physics of the polar atmosphere and the impact of the Sun-Earth interactions on the polar regions. It is endorsed by SCAR...
COSMO experiment is aimed at detecting CMB spectral distortions from Concordia Station in Antarctica.
It is based on a cryogenic FFT spectrometer using KIDs as fast detectors. The reduced number of pixels and the fast acquisition rate, tens of kHz, prompted us to develop an in-house heterodyne readout electronics based on commercial components. In this contribution I will describe in detail...
Dome A, the highest point of the Antarctic plateau, is one of best astronomical sites in the world. From 2008, China established a scientific site at Dome A and started time-domain photometry surveys, e.g. CSTAR and AST3. The exoplanet and variable searching programs are two of the major scientific aims of the AST3-II telescope. In 2019, the first data release of CHESPA (Chinese Exoplanet...
