• DOI:10.1117/12.789741
• Corpus ID: 17238979

Pre-HEAT: submillimeter site testing and astronomical spectra from Dome A, Antarctica

@inproceedings{Kulesa2008PreHEATSS,
  title={Pre-HEAT: submillimeter site testing and astronomical spectra from Dome A, Antarctica},
  author={Craig Alan Kulesa and Christopher K. Walker and Michael Schein and Dathon R. Golish and N. F. H. Tothill and Peter H. Siegel and Sander Weinreb and G. Jones and Joseph C. Bardin and Keren Jacobs and C. L. Martin and John W. V. Storey and Michael C. B. Ashley and Jonathan S. Lawrence and Daniel Luong-Van and Jon R. Everett and L. Wang and L. Feng and Z. Zhu and J. Yan and J. Yang and X-G Zhang and Xiang-qun Cui and X. Q. Yuan and J. Hu and Z. Xu and Z. Jiang and H. Yang and Y. Li and B. N. Sun and Weijia Qin and Zhaohui Shang},
  booktitle={Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation},
  year={2008}
}

• C. Kulesa, C. Walker, +29 authors Z. Shang
• Published in
  Astronomical Telescopes…
  10 July 2008
• Physics

Pre-HEAT is a 20 cm aperture submillimeter-wave telescope with a 660 GHz (450 micron) Schottky diode heterodyne receiver and digital FFT spectrometer for the Plateau Observatory (PLATO) developed by the University of New South Wales. In January 2008 it was deployed to Dome A, the summit of the Antarctic plateau, as part of a scientific traverse led by the Polar Research Institute of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dome A may be one of the best sites in the world for ground based Terahertz astronomy, based on the exceptionally cold, dry and stable conditions which prevail there. Pre-HEAT is measuring the 450 micron sky opacity at Dome A and mapping the Galactic Plane in the 13CO J=6-5 line, constituting the first submillimeter measurements from Dome A. It is field-testing many of the key technologies for its namesake -- a successor mission called HEAT: the High Elevation Antarctic Terahertz telescope. Exciting prospects for submillimeter astronomy from Dome A and the status of Pre-HEAT will be presented.