90 GHz Observations with the Green Bank Telescope

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AST-0607654DevlinThis project will commission and use the Penn Array Receiver (PAR), a new 64-element bolometer camera, custom-designed for use on the 100m Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at a wavelength of 3mm (frequency 90GHz). The PAR itself is already funded by the NSF, through its center, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. By taking advantage of the GBT's large collecting area, the PAR will be the fastest and most sensitive millimeter-wave mapping array in the world. Demonstration science projects cover a wide range, from the solar system to the Galaxy to cosmological structure (including the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and high redshift galaxies). As the end-to-end efficiency increases at 3mm over the next few years, more and more challenging projects will be undertaken by the PAR, in a staged approach that starts with the observations most likely to be successful.Inevitably, a new capability such as this will have wide but hard-to-anticipate impacts. This project is a necessary and critical step towards making the instrument usable by the widest possible community of astronomers. The group is an international collaboration of institutions in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Mexico, and the exchange of knowledge, resources and students will help to strengthen ties.