Cosmic Microwave Background experiments need to measure polarization properties of the incoming radiation very accurately to achieve their scientific goals. As a result of that, it is necessary to properly characterize these instruments. However, there are not natural sources that can be used for this purpose. For this reason, we developed the PROTOtype CALibrator for Cosmology, PROTOCALC, which is a calibrator source designed for the 90 GHz band of these telescopes. This source is purely polarized and the direction of the polarization vector is known with an accuracy better than 0.1°. This source flew for the first time in May 2022 showing promising result.
KEYWORDS: Polarization, Telescopes, Calibration, Beam shaping, Sensors, Control systems, Birefringence, Contamination, Time metrology, Global Positioning System
Experiments to measure the polarization of the CMB require an exquisite characterization and control of optical systematics to achieve their scientific goals. Unfortunately, there are only very few natural polarized calibration sources, for which an artificial source becomes an appealing alternative. Here we present the development of a polarized calibration source that can be mounted on a drone to illuminate telescopes at a distance and away from the ground loading. We implemented a 150 GHz coherent source, with a single selectable linear polarization, fixed frequency and electronic chopper at 10 Hz. The source position is measured to better than 2 cm and 0.05 degrees using photogrammetry and a differential GPS. This source can be used to measure the polarized beam shape, relative and absolute polarization angles and map far sidelobes.
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