Foreground Separation Methods for Satellite and Balloon Experiments

A combined technique using the maximum-entropy method (MEM) and the mexican hat wavelet (MHW) to separate and reconstruct the physical components of the microwave sky is presented. We apply this method to simulated observations by the ESA Planck satellite in small patches of the sky. The reconstructed maps of the CMB and foregrounds are improved as compared to those obtained with MEM on its own. Moreover, more accurate point source catalogues are produced at each observing frequency. This technique may also be extended to deal with other multifrequency CMB experiments, including all-sky data.