PILOT

PILOT (Polarized Instrument for Long Wavelength Observation of the Tenuous ISM) is balloon-borne experiment to obtain wide-field maps of the polarised thermal dust emission at 240 microns in the Milky Way and Local Group galaxies. There have been two scientific PILOT flights, from Timmins, Canada in 2015 and from Alice Springs, Australia in 2017. A third scientific PILOT flight from Timmins is scheduled for September 2019.

CADE currently only distributes a PILOT Stokes I map and normalised PILOT Stokes Q and U maps of a 4° x 7° field (-2°<l<2°, -4°<b<3°) covering the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) of the Milky Way. PILOT data for other regions will be added to this page in the future. The PILOT CMZ data were obtained during the Alice Springs 2017 flight, and have an angular resolution of 2.2 arcminutes. The scientific analysis of the PILOT CMZ data is presented in Mangilli et al (2019, see references below).

The units of the Stokes I data are MJy/sr. The Stokes Q and U data have been scaled to yield an artificial polarization fraction of 100%. With this normalisation, the PILOT Stokes Q and U maps are suitable for deriving the dust polarization angle, but not the dust polarization fraction.

Healpix maps made by D. Paradis.

References

'The geometry of the magnetic field in the Central Molecular Zone measured by PILOT ' by Mangilli, A. et al, 2019, A&A, 630, 74 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019A%26A...630A..74M/abstract
'Inflight performance of the PILOT balloon-borne experiment' by Mangilli, A. et al., 2019, Experimental Astronomy, 48, 265 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ExA....48..265M/abstract
'PILOT: a balloon-borne experiment to measure the polarized FIR emission of dust grains in the interstellar medium' by Bernard, J.-Ph. et al., 2016, Experimental Astronomy, 42, 199 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ExA....42..199B/abstract