Overview and Status of the Simons Observatory

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a next generation Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiment that is under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert. SO’s scientific objectives encompass the characterization of the primordial perturbations, the measurement of the number of relativistic species and the sum of the mass of neutrinos, improving our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constraining the duration of reionization. SO will accomplish these goals using a single 6-m large-aperture telescope (LAT) to focus on the smaller angular scales and three 0.5-m small-aperture telescopes (SATs) to focus on the larger angular scales. These telescopes will contain nearly 60,000 transition edge sensor bolometers spread across size frequency bands from 30-280 GHz. I will review the scientific objectives and forecasts as well as the survey and instrument designs and status.