MG14 - Talk detail

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SPIDER is a balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed to measure cosmological B-modes on scales larger than 1/2 degree in the presence of Galactic foregrounds. With six independent telescopes housing a total of 2400 detectors in the 95 GHz and 150 GHz frequency bands, SPIDER is the most instantaneously-sensitive mm-wave polarimeter deployed on the sky to date (total instrument sensitivity near 3 uK-rts). SPIDER was successfully launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica in January 2015 and acquired science data for 16 days. I will summarize the in-flight performance and present highlights from the ongoing data-analysis. Pending recovery, the SPIDER team is already planning the next flight, featuring one or two foreground-optimized channels (>= 250 GHz), which will allow us constrain the primordial tensor-mode amplitude at the level of r < 0.03 (99% CL), even in the presence of foregrounds.

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