The BOOMERANG North America Instrument: a balloon-borne bolometric radiometer optimized for measurements of cosmic background radiation anisotropies from 0.3 to 4 degrees

Abstract

We describe the BOOMERANG North America (BNA) instrument, a balloon-borne bolometric radiometer designed to map the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation with 0.3 deg resolution over a significant portion of the sky. This receiver employs new technologies in bolometers, readout electronics, millimeter-wave optics and filters, cryogenics, scan and attitude reconstruction. All these subsystems are described in detail in this paper. The system has been fully calibrated in flight using a variety of techniques which are described and compared. It has been able to obtain a measurement of the first peak in the CMB angular power spectrum in a single balloon flight, few hours long, and was a prototype of the BOOMERANG Long Duration Balloon (BLDB) experiment.