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The proposed CMBPol mission will be able to detect the imprint of topological defects on the CMB provided the contribution is sufficiently strong. We quantify the detection threshold for cosmic strings and for textures and analyze the satellite's ability to distinguish between these different types of defects. We also assess the level of danger of misidentification of a defect signature as from the wrong defect type or as an effect of primordial gravitational waves. A 0.002 fractional contribution of cosmic strings to the CMB temperature spectrum at multipole ten and similarly a 0.001 fractional contribution of textures can be detected and correctly identified at the 3 sigma level. We also confirm that a tensor contribution of r = 0: 0018 can be detected at over 3 sigma in agreement with the CMBPol mission concept study. These results are supported by a model selection analysis.

We present a significant improvement over our previous calculations of the cosmic string contribution to cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra with particular focus on sub WMAP angular scales. These smaller scales are relevant for the now operational Planck satellite and additional suborbital CMB projects that have even finer resolutions. We employ larger Abelian Higgs string simulations than before and we additionally model and extrapolate the statistical measures from our simulations to smaller length scales. We then use an efficient means of including the extrapolations into our Einstein Boltzmann calculations in order to yield accurate results over the multipole range 2