BLAST-TNG Initial Results for HII Region RCW 92B

The January 2020 Antarctic flight of BLAST-TNG made the first observations using microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) from a NASA sub-orbital platform. Despite the very short flight duration, we obtained valuable test data including observations of RCW 92B. The left and right panels, respectively, show initial results at 350 and 500 microns. In each case, we show (in blue) the signal collected by just one MKID during a single sweep through this double-peaked Galactic HII region. The same plots also show (in orange) the corresponding profile of the target from maps made by ESA’s SPIRE/Herschel instrument. The BLAST-TNG sweeps shown here each correspond to two seconds of data. We are using these and other flight data to characterize the performance of our detectors and optics. See publications section for links to recent papers.