CMBPol Mission Concept Study
Telecon notes
22 April, 2008

Participants:
Bock, Borrill, Dunkley, Hinshaw, Kogut, Lee, Meyer, Page, Ruhl, Shimon

Workshops: 

Dickenson writes: Just a reminder that early registration is approaching for the foregrounds meeting in Pasadena, 14-18 July. There will be a session on future experiments, with which I hope some of you will be interested and can present material (either talks or posters).
http://planck.ipac.caltech.edu/content/ForegroundsConference/Home.html

Hinshaw: Invitation letter sent around which includes a program. Comments to Hinshaw and Ruhl requested. Link to letter: http://cmbpol.uchicago.edu/Telecon%20files/20080422_telecon/Hinshaw-Ruhl-invite-letter.txt

Announcement:

Borrill: 50,000 hours of computing has been granted to the CMBPol Mission Concept Study. 

A new tool being developed primarily by Chris Cantalupo is on-the-fly timestream simulation capability. It currently comprises signal (scanned from an input map) and white noise, but with noise of any given spectral properties and source catalogues to be added in the near future. The idea would be that any code requiring time-ordered data (typically a map-making code) would simply issue a request for the data and it would then be generated on the fly rather than pre-simulated and read from disk.

Coupled with Ted Kisner's generalized compressed pointing (GCP) library - which reconstructs the full/dense pointing of a specific detector on the fly from possibly sparse sampled possibly generalized (eg. boresight, satellite, or some such) pointing - this will allow us to simulate and map a mission's entire time-ordered data set without ever having to write, store or read it.

The only requirements will be (i) a scanning strategy, (ii) a description of the focal plane, (iii) the beam-smoothed input sky(s) to be observed, and (iv) the noise properties of the detectors. Currently we're developing this for Planck, EBEx and PolarBear, but it is (by design) generic enough for any mission.


Budget:

Meyer: University grant materials were sent to CoIs and should be processed as soon as possible. These grants will now be directly from NASA (not through Chicago) Materials were sent by Mary Wawro last week. Government lab funding arrangements are unchanged but may require new statement of work to reflect reduced funding.