In-flight main beam reconstruction for Planck-LFI

In-flight measurements of the shape of the antenna main beam is a crucial input to the data analysis pipeline of each high resolution Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy experiment. We study the main beam reconstruction achievable by the PLANCK Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) through the observation of external planets. Although we restrict our analysis to the 30 GHz LFI channel, the method can be easily extended to all the PLANCK frequency channels and to other CMB anisotropy experiments. We show that it is possible to fit the time ordered data from the external planets (mainly Jupiter and Saturn) to obtain an accurate, robust, simple and fast reconstruction of the main beam properties under very general conditions, almost independently of the calibration accuracy. In addition, we find that a bivariate Gaussian approximation of main beam shapes represents a significant improvement with respect to a symmetric representation. The impact of the most relevant systematic effects is also addressed. We demonstrate that by combining the recovery of the maximum signal at the planet transit with accurate in-flight calibration, it is possible to measure the intrinsic planet temperatures at millimetric wavelengths with <1% accuracy. This work is based on PLANCK-LFI activities.