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C. D. Dowell, W. Collins, M. Gardner, A. Kovacs, D. C. Lis, T. G. Phillips, H. Yoshida (California Institute of Technology), C. Allen, M. Jhabvala, S. H. Moseley, Jr., G. Voellmer (NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center)
Development of a new facility 350 micron camera (`SHARC II') for the 10 m Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is underway. The camera will feature a 12x32 array of doped silicon Pop-Up Bolometers -- scheduled for delivery from NASA-Goddard to Caltech toward the end of 2001 -- cooled with 3He to 0.3 K. Detector absorption resonances, filters, and anti-reflection coatings are optimized for 350 microns. The pixels will sub-sample the diffraction pattern of the CSO with a spacing of 5 arcsec (0.7 lambda/D). We are implementing `total power' amplifiers to allow scanned observations with good image reconstruction fidelity and sensitivity. The expected point-source sensitivity of SHARC II in excellent weather is 0.5 Jy s-1/2, an improvement of a factor of 2 over the existing SHARC (Wang et al. 1996; Benford et al. 1999). We report on an engineering run with the camera at the CSO in September 2000 using a partial (16-pixel) detector array.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: cdd@submm.caltech.edu