The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST)

This thesis presents a description of the instrumentation and Galactic science from the 2006 flight of the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST). BLAST flies on a high altitude, long duration, balloon platform and was designed to conduct large area submillimeter surveys to constrain the star formation history of the high-redshift universe and to probe the earliest stages of star formation within our own Galaxy. The BLAST telescope has a 1.8 m aluminum primary mirror giving resolutions of 36, 42, and 60 in its 250, 350, and 500 μm bands—at or near the diffraction limit. The telescope performed at or near the proposal specifications for the entire 11 day 2006 Antarctic flight. The 50 deg2 Galactic plane map in Vela (260° \u3c l \u3c 270°) yielded over 1000 compact sources, with source temperatures down to 8.3K. The mass function for cold cores is determined as is an estimate for the lifetime of these cold cores