Balloon-Borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) Data

Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a 2-m telescope that has conducted a series of sub-mm imaging surveys at wavelengths 250-500 µm, starting in 2005.

BLAST has measured photometric redshifts, rest-frame far-infrared (FIR) luminosities and star formation rates of high-redshift starburst galaxies, thereby constraining the evolutionary history of those galaxies that produce the FIR/submillimeter background. It has also measured cold pre-stellar sources associated with the earliest stages of the star and planet formation and has made high-resolution maps of diffuse galactic emission over a wide range of galactic latitudes.

Built and flown by a collaboration of universities from Canada, the United States of America (USA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Mexico, the telescope initially used a prototype of the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) camera for the Herschel satellite, but since 2010 it has had unique polarimetry capabilities added.

The data is also published by the Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC) (http://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/).