FOREGROUND SEPARATION METHODS FOR SATELLITE-OBSERVATIONS OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND

A maximum entropy method (MEM) is presented for separating the emissio n resulting from different foreground components from simulated satell ite observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). In particular, the method is applied to simulated observations by the proposed Planck Surveyor satellite. The simulations, performed by Bouc het & Gispert, include emission from the CMBR and the kinetic and ther mal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects from galaxy clusters, as well as G alactic dust, free-free and synchrotron emission. We find that the MEM technique performs well and produces faithful reconstructions of the main input components. The method is also compared with traditional Wi ener filtering and is shown to produce consistently better results, pa rticularly in the recovery of the thermal SZ effect.