LiteBIRD Newsflash
Just a quick post to pass on the news that the space mission LiteBIRD has been selected as the next major mission by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA and Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).
LiteBIRD (which stands for `Lite (Light) satellite for the studies of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection’) is a planned space observatory that aims to detect the footprint of the primordial gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in a form of a B-mode polarization pattern. This is the signal that BICEP2 claimed to have detected five years ago to much excitement, but was later shown to be a caused by galactic dust.
It’s great news for a lot of CMB people all round the world that this mission has been selected – include some old friends from Cardiff University. Congratulations to all of them!
I’m not sure when the launch date will be, but the mission will last three years and will be at Earth-Sun Lagrange point known as L2.It will be a very difficult task to extract the B-mode signal from foregrounds and instrumental artifacts so although there’s joy that it has been selected, the real work starts now!
Follow @telescoper
In the Dark 
May 23, 2019 at 5:55 pm
It has got a frequency coverage of 40GHz-400Ghz
LFT and HFT for component separation and actively cooled
some 2622 polarimeters that targets r~0.001. So if gravity wave induced B-mode is not detected I guess some serious rethinking will
be needed about inflation. Who knows Ekpyrotic models
are correct after all? Wonder which experiment is its
main competitor in US and Europe (Simons Observatory)?
While these experiments tend to focus at low ell (<100),
what other CMB experiments are currently under progress that
will be focusing on lensing of CMB that may not be as
fundamental as B-mode detection but has a strong science case.
October 12, 2023 at 9:05 pm
[…] was more than four years ago that I passed on the news that the space mission LiteBIRD had been selected as the next major mission by the […]
October 13, 2023 at 6:52 am
[…] was more than four years ago that I passed on the news that the space mission LiteBIRD had been selected as the next major mission by the […]