Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope

Built and flown by an international collaboration headed by the University of Pennsylvania (P.I. Mark Devlin), the telescope uses a prototype of the SPIRE camera for the Herschel satellite. Despite parts of this band being available to ground-based telescopes from high-altitude sites such as Mauna Kea (e.g. JCMT) and Chile (e.g. future ALMA site), BLAST surveys are currently un-matched in sensitivity and area given the comparatively negligible atmospheric water vapour at 38 km altitude.