(Edmonton) Undergraduate Physics students are keeping a balloon flight program aloft with research that goes beyond their original assignments.
This summer, students were asked "to build an x-ray detector that could be flown," according to David Milling, the Department of Physics staff member who coordinated the flight. Naturally occurring x-rays enter the Earth's atmosphere, but do not reach the ground, so measurements must be taken in the sky.
Collin Cupido, a third-year astrophysics student, said he and project partner Alex Hamilton had almost completed the assignment when time ran out.
"We had worked on getting the sensor running all summer and nearly finished it before school started," said Cupido. "The only way to make up for that was to fly it as soon as we could, which happened to be during the fall semester. I wasn't interested in waiting an entire year to see if what we had done was a waste of time or real science."
On a frigid early December morning, the balloon was successfully launched and flown. Cupido, Hamilton and Milling were joined by three other students who helped to track the balloon through the amateur radio network and to retrieve it.
Data failed to write to a flash drive enclosed in the balloon, but the project was anything but a waste of time. "We've done some testing since then and found there was a reproducible problem with a particular circuit in the cold, said Milling. "It wasn't the actual instrument, it was the data-writing side of it. It's unfortunate, but it's actually a very valuable lesson in that they have to cover all their bases in the testing before they can fly."
In addition, the flight extended the department's involvement in balloon launches. "We wanted to keep the balloon program alive and to bring new people into it," Milling said. "There was a U of A balloon launch program, but people kind of drifted off, so we are in danger of losing the experience that's required to run those things, whether it's for student projects or more formal course requirements."
The students' experience is also a valuable step toward participating in a much larger project called CABERET, funded by the Canada Space Agency. Milling, who leads CABERET, says the project will put a magnetometer on a balloon containing an x-ray detector built by Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Cupido, Hamilton and other University of Alberta students spent some time in New Hamshire this summer building and testing some of the equipment that will be used in Dartmouth's project to fly about 40 balloons from the Antarctic in January 2013 and 2014, all making x-ray measurements.
"The idea was to put together a payload and do some cross-referencing between different data sets," Milling said. "The goal is to fly a much larger balloon payload in Canada in 2014. This [recent launch] is a small-scale version, so there's a hope of getting some of the students to contribute to projects like this."
More immediately, Cupido plans to do another launch, weather permitting. "The next step in the project is to fly the payload again, applying the lessons learned in our first flight. This will be sometime in the winter semester, I think. We need to try and get some interesting data, and that is the fun part. Everything has to work together and both terrestrial and space weather aren't always cooperative."