Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST)

The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a 2-m telescope that conducted the first wide-area (> many square degrees) sub-mm surveys at wavelengths 250--500 um. Built and flown by an international collaboration headed by the University of Pennsylvania (P.I. Mark Devlin), the telescope uses a prototype of the SPIRE camera for the Herschel satellite. Despite parts of this band being available to ground-based telescopes from high-altitude sites such as Mauna Kea (e.g. JCMT) and Chile (e.g. future ALMA site), BLAST surveys are currently un-matched in sensitivity and area given the comparatively negligible atmospheric water vapour at 38 km altitude.

This dataset or service is made available by the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at IPAC, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.