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Session 71 - Space Astronomy in the Next Millennium.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The microwave sky is dominated by relic emission from the cosmic microwave background and local emission from within our Galaxy. The spatial distribution and frequency spectrum of these components probe physical conditions ranging from the early universe to the local interstellar medium. The Diffuse Microwave Emission Survey (DIMES) will measure the frequency spectrum of the diffuse emission at centimeter wavelengths to 0.01% precision, and will map the angular distribution to precision \Delta T/T = 10^-5 per 6\deg field of view. DIMES will provide quantitative information on processes such as the transition from an ionized universe to a neutral state and the subsequent heating and reionization by the first generation of collapsed objects, the abundance, lifetimes, and decay modes of hypothesized non-baryonic dark matter particles, the heating mechanism and energy balance of the high-latitude interstellar medium, and the acceleration mechanism of cosmic-ray electrons.
