Search

Future cosmology space missions will concentrate on measuring the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which potentially carries invaluable information about the earliest phases of the evolution of our universe. Such ambitious projects will ultimately be limited by the sensitivity of the instrument and by the accuracy at which polarized foreground emission from our own Galaxy can be subtracted out. We present the PILOT balloon project which will aim at characterizing one of these foreground sources, the polarization of the dust continuum emission in the diffuse interstellar medium. The PILOT experiment will also constitute a test-bed for using multiplexed bolometer arrays for polarization measurements. We present the results of ground tests obtained just before the first flight of the instrument., Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures. Presented at SPIE, Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy VII. To be published in Proc. SPIE volume 9153

The French instrument ECLAIRs, to be part of the French and Chinese SVOM mission for the study of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), will detect bursts between 4 and 250 keV. Its detector plane is an assembly of 200 elementary detection modules (XRDPIX) equipped with 32 Schottky CdTe detectors, produced by ACRORAD in Japan. The innovative concept of XRDPIX will enable a 4 keV low-energy threshold to be achieved. After introducing the SVOM payload, the ECLAIRs instrument and its detector plane, this paper presents the results of the performance evaluation of a first set of 500 detectors, and briefly describes the tests foreseen for the first XRDPIX prototypes.