Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER): A Probe of Extragalactic Background Light from Reionization

The Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER) is a rocket-borne absolute photometry imaging and spectroscopy experiment optimized to detect signatures of first-light galaxies present during reionization in the unresolved IR background. CIBER-I consists of a wide-field two-color camera for fluctuation measurements, a low-resolution absolute spectrometer for absolute EBL measurements, and a narrow-band imaging spectrometer to measure and correct scattered emission from the foreground zodiacal cloud. CIBER-I was successfully flown on February 25th, 2009 and has one more planned flight in early 2010. We propose, after several additional flights of CIBER-I, an improved CIBER-II camera consisting of a wide-field 30 cm imager operating in 4 bands between 0.5 and 2.1 microns. It is designed for a high significance detection of unresolved IR background fluctuations at the minimum level necessary for reionization. With a FOV 50 to 2000 times largerthan existing IR instruments on satellites, CIBER-II will carry out the definitive study to establish the surface density of sources responsible for reionization.