MISTRAL: first light from the Sardinia Radio Telescope and status of the technical commissioning

Le résumé fourni par la source

The Millimeter Sardinia radio Telescope Receiver based on Array of Lumped elements kids (MISTRAL) is a novel multi-beam cryogenic camera currently installed at the gregorian focus of the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT), sensitive to the W-band. It features a wide 4 arcminute field of view sampled by 415 Lumped Elements Kinetic Inductance Detectors (LEKIDs), sensitive to continuum radiation in the 77-103 GHz band. Coupled to the 64m dish of SRT with a custom cold (4K) re-imaging system composed of two silicon lenses, it produces a beamwidth of 12 arcseconds. MISTRAL is one of the working packages of the SRT-Highfreq project, that aims to expand the capabilities of SRT up to the W band. The high sensitivity and wide field of view makes MISTRAL suitable for wide area continuum surveys in the W band, offering great complementarity with interferometers and CMB survey instruments, covering the gap in angular scales between 10 arcsecond and 4 arcminutes allowing for a high spatial dynamic range. These capabilities are shared only by few instruments in the world installed on 50-100m class radio telescopes. After the technical and scientific commissioning, MISTRAL will be open to the scientific community. The 90 GHz band is very interesting for a wide range of science cases, spanning from cosmology to galactic science, as many astrophysical processes are observable in that band. In this contribution, we report the status of the commissioning of MISTRAL after the first year of observations from the SRT, in preparation to the opening to proposals from the scientific community. We will report the on-sky performance of the instrument, its resolution and wide area scanning capabilities, showing the first light maps from the commissioning runs.

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