SPT survey underway! Go to main SPT website for more information.
SPT is a project to build an off-axis 10m telescope at the South Pole to study dark energy. It has been funded by the NSF Office of Polar Programs. The project is led by John Carlstrom at the University of Chicago. The project manager is Steve Padin (U Chicago), and the team is spread over five institutions: U Chicago (T. Crawford, S. Meyer, C. Pryke), UC Berkeley (Bill Holzapfel, Adrian Lee and Helmut Spieler), Case Western Reserve University (John Ruhl), University of Illinois (Joe Mohr), and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (Antony Stark). The SPT group is much larger than this. Please follow the link the SPT homepage at U Chicago for further information.
The South Pole Telescope will be used to create a high angular resolution image of the cosmic microwave background over 10% of the sky. This region will be mapped at several frequencies, including 90 GHz, 150 GHz, 220 GHz and 270 GHz. This map will be used to study the changes in the galaxy cluster population from the young universe to the present. To study the dark energy the cluster redshifts will also be needed. We have developed a phased approach to obtaining the redshifts, which begins with a small multiband survey using the MOSAIC II camera on the Blanco 4m, continued with cluster by cluster followup using the Harvard Simultaneous Multiband Imager (SMI; PI: Stubbs), and then ends with full followup using the data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES).
