Tenerife Experiment

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The Tenerife Experiment was a Cosmic Microwave Background CMB experiment built by Jodrell Bank of the University of Manchester and in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias IAC it was installed and run at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife in 1984 and ran with various upgrades and additional experiments until 2000.

It measured the anisotropy of the CMB on angular sizes of 5 degrees, that's about the size of the upper half of the constellation of Orion (ie from the belt to his shoulders). In order to reduce receiver instablity it did fast Dicke Switching between two horns separated by 8 degrees. In order to remove long term drifts and atmospheric variations it used a further switch of 8 degrees using a flat mirror in front of the horns.

There were three radiometers working at 10.45, 14.9 and 32.5 GHz (ie 3, 2 and 1 cm in wavelenght). This allowed the identification of CMB and galactic signals since the thermal black body CMB signal has the same temperature at these frequencies, whereas galactic signals rapidally drop with frequency.