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Super simple things to do with balloons : fun and easy science for kids
Presents several fun science experiments one can do with a balloon.
Book
The PMC Turbo Balloon Mission to Measure Gravity Waves and Turbulence in Polar Mesospheric Clouds: Camera, Telemetry, and Software Performance
The Polar Mesospheric Cloud Turbulence (PMC Turbo) instrument consists of a balloon‐borne platform which hosts seven cameras and a Rayleigh lidar. During a 6‐day flight in July 2018, the cameras captured images of Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs) with a sensitivity to spatial scales from ~20 m to 100 km at a ~2‐s cadence and a full field of view (FOV) of hundreds of kilometers. We developed software optimized for imaging of PMCs, controlling multiple independent cameras, compressing and storing images, and for choosing telemetry communication channels. We give an overview of the PMC Turbo design focusing on the flight software and telemetry functions. We describe the performance of the system during its first flight in July 2018. Key Points PMC Turbo, a balloon‐borne platform hosting seven cameras and a Rayleigh lidar, launched in July 2018 We describe the camera hardware and image capture methods used during the mission We describe the design and performance of the flight control hardware and software
Journal Article
Hard X-Ray/Soft Gamma-Ray Experiments and Missions: Overview and Prospects
Starting from 1960s, a great number of missions and experiments have been performed for the study of the high-energy sky. This review gives a wide vision of the most important space missions and balloon experiments that have operated in the 10–600 keV band, a crucial window for the study of the most energetic and violent phenomena in the Universe. Thus it is important to take the stock of the achievements to better establish what we have still to do with future missions in order to progress in this field, to establish which are the technologies required to solve the still open issues and to extend our knowledge of the Universe.
Journal Article
The Cherenkov Camera for the PBR Mission
POEMMA-Balloon with Radio (PBR) is designed as a payload for a NASA suborbital Super Pressure Balloon that will circle over the Southern Ocean and a mission duration as long as 50 days. The PBR instrument consists of a 1.1 m aperture Schmidt telescope similar to the POEMMA design with two cameras in its focal surface: a Fluorescence Camera (FC) and a Cherenkov Camera (CC). The CC camera is mainly devoted to the observation of cosmic-ray-induced high-altitude horizontal air showers (HAHAs) and search for neutrino-induced upward-going EAS. It will be made of 2048 SiPMs with a surface of 3 × 3 mm2 and a FoV of 12° by 6°, covering a spectral range of 320–900 nm. The CC camera is an innovative detector currently under construction. In this paper, information about its current status will be given.
Journal Article
Indirect search for dark matter with cosmic-ray antinuclei: the GAPS experiment
The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is a balloon-borne experiment designed to perform low-energy cosmic-ray antinuclei measurements to search for indirect signatures of dark matter annihilation or decay. A wide range of well-motivated dark matter models predicts antinuclei fluxes about two orders of magnitude above the expected astrophysical background below 250 MeV/ n . The study of this unexplored low-energy region allows GAPS to achieve an unprecedented sensitivity for antideuteron and antihelium nuclei fluxes. GAPS will collect high statistics of low-energy antiprotons, extending the measurement of the antiproton spectrum to the unexplored region below 100 MeV. The GAPS experiment will perform three long-duration balloon flights over Antarctica, the first of which is planned for the 2024/2025 Austral summer. The experimental apparatus consists of a Si(Li) tracker surrounded by a time-of-flight system made of plastic scintillator paddles. GAPS uses a novel identification technique based on the formation of an exotic atom and its de-excitation and decay. This contribution will first illustrate the scientific potential of the GAPS experiment and its impact on indirect dark matter searches. It will then describe the experimental apparatus and the detection technique exploited to identify antinuclei events. The expected sensitivity for antinuclei, based on detailed instrument simulations, will be then discussed. Finally, the status of payload integration and testing before the first flight will be summarized.
Journal Article
Atmospheric antideuteron flux within a dynamical coalescence approach
A
bstract
Cosmic antideuterons are considered as one of the most promising tools for the indirect detection of dark matter due to their ultra-low astrophysical backgrounds. Currently only upper limits on the antideuteron flux exist, but advancements in experimental detection technology may soon lead to positive signals. A major source of background is the production of secondary antideuterons through collisions of cosmic rays with the surrounding medium. In this study, antideuteron production is modeled using a multiphase transport model (AMPT) coupled with a dynamical coalescence model. By applying a widely used leaky box model and incorporating specific processes, we present a new theoretical baseline for atmospheric secondary antideuteron flux, including a tertiary contribution, from primary cosmic rays interacting with Earth’s atmosphere. Our results indicate that the atmospheric antideuteron flux are within the range of various existing calculations and remain well below the upper limits set by the Balloon-borne Experiment with a Superconducting Spectrometer (BESS). The atmospheric antideuteron is found to dominate the antideuteron background at kinetic energies below 0
.
26 GeV/n.
Journal Article
Cosmic Ray Susceptibility of the Terahertz Intensity Mapper Detector Arrays
We report on the effects of cosmic ray interactions with the kinetic inductance detector (KID)-based focal plane array for the terahertz intensity mapper (TIM). TIM is a NASA-funded balloon-borne experiment designed to probe the peak of the star formation in the Universe. It employs two spectroscopic bands, each equipped with a focal plane of four
∼
900-pixel, KID-based array chips. Measurements of an 864-pixel TIM array show 791 resonators in a 0.5 GHz bandwidth. We discuss challenges with resonator calibration caused by this high multiplexing density. We robustly identify the physical positions of 788 (99.6 %) detectors using a custom LED-based identification scheme. Using this information, we show that cosmic ray events occur at a rate of 2.1
events
/
min
/
cm
2
in our array. 66 % of the events affect a single pixel, and other 33 % affect
<
5 KIDs per event spread over a 0.66
cm
2
region (2 pixel pitches in radius). We observe a total cosmic ray dead fraction of 0.0011 % and predict that the maximum possible in-flight dead fraction is
∼
0.124 %, which demonstrates our design will be robust against these high-energy events.
Journal Article
A Characterization Procedure for Large Area Spiderweb TES
In this communication, we describe a characterization procedure suitable to extract the most relevant design parameters of a large area absorber TES, designed for Cosmic Microwave Background measurements, very similar to those that will be fabricated for the LSPE/SWIPE balloon-borne experiment. This is a large (8 mm diameter) Au-on-SiN spiderweb designed to collect many modes of the incoming microwave radiation, in the 145–240 GHz range. After obtaining the critical temperature of the Ti/Au TES and its I–V characteristics, we operate it in Negative Electrothermal Feedback (ETF, DC voltage bias) and we record its response after amplification by a SQUID Array Amplifier. Then, in the same conditions, we illuminate the central area of the absorber with a pulsed LED (red visible light), mounted in the cryogenic environment, with pulses short enough to mimic an instantaneous energy deposition. Furthermore, the same LED is driven to produce a slow modulation of the output signal, to explore the bolometric regime of the TES. With this set of measurements we are able to extract its thermal conductance, its natural time constant, and the loop gain associated with the optimal bias point.
Journal Article
Study of secondary cosmic rays using small stratospheric balloon missions
Secondary cosmic rays are produced from the interaction of primary cosmic rays, which are high-energy (
∼
GeV) particles originating from outer space, primarily, protons (
∼
89%) and alpha particles (
∼
10%) with atoms (mainly nitrogen and hydrogen) present in our Earth’s atmosphere. Such rays are dependent on solar activity and geomagnetic latitude through magnetic rigidity and are found to be modulated by these factors. For analysis of secondary cosmic ray data, we use the Indian Centre for Space Physics’s data obtained through small stratospheric balloon-borne experiments. In the present paper, we have measured the secondary cosmic ray intensity at low geomagnetic latitude of
∼
14.50
∘
N in the low energy range of 25–60 keV from the ground to 30 km altitude for different detectors used in various balloon missions because such missions are almost detecting the X-ray sources above 30 km till 42 km. We also calculated background flux of the detector with the help of some justifiable physical assumptions, secondary cosmic gamma-ray component measurements, and assumed internal background functions. Finally, using our data of 2012–2019, which falls in the 24th solar cycle, we have shown that there is a clear anti-correlation between cosmic ray intensity at Regener–Pfotzer maximum and the solar activity.
Journal Article
Study of solar flares and gamma-ray bursts using low-cost stratospheric balloon borne experiments
Solar flare intensity is strongly dependent on the phase in the solar cycle, the structure and dynamics of the magnetic field near sunspots, and also on occasional solar coronal mass ejections. In this paper we study some of the solar flares detected by the stratospheric balloon borne experiments of Indian Centre for Space Physics. We also observe a gamma-ray burst which is believed to be originated from sudden energy release in gamma rays. In the hard X-ray region of 10 − 100 keV, we present and analyze data from various classes of solar flares and a gamma-ray burst. Because of natural constraints present in balloon borne experiments we receive data up to about a height of ∼ 42 km. The Earth’s residual atmosphere at this height absorbs the lower energy part of the spectrum. Moreover, the background radiation (mainly secondary cosmic rays) introduces noise. We show how we circumvent these limitations and create the accurate light curves and the spectra of a few solar flares and a gamma-ray burst.
Journal Article