A maximum entropy method (MEM) is presented for separating the emission due
to different foreground components from simulated satellite 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 Bouchet and Gispert (1998), include emission from
the CMBR, the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects from galaxy
clusters, as well as Galactic 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 Wiener
filtering and is shown to produce consistently better results, particularly in
the recovery of the thermal SZ effect.Comment: 31 pages, 19 figures (bitmapped), accpeted for publication in MNRA