In the Dark


It 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 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 nine years ago to muc excitement, but was later shown to be a caused by galactic dust.
At the time, I said that this was great news for a lot of CMB people all round the world that this mission had been selected – include some old friends from Cardiff University. Well, I’ve just seen a news item announcing a grant to Cardiff astrophysicists who will lead the UK involvement and develop the optical design.
The launch date has slipped into the 2030s (no doubt partly because of the pandemic) so I’ll be long retired before it happens, but the mission will last three years and will, like Euclid, 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 but I wish LiteBIRD every success!

This entry was posted on October 12, 2023 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Cardiff, The Universe and Stuff with tags B-mode, Cardiff, ISAS, JAXA, Litebird, Primordial Gravitational Waves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.