Around the pole
Happy New Year and Year of Astronomy to everyone!
I’ve been spending the last month in Berkeley, about 1.5 hours north of my main home and job in Santa Cruz. I spend two or three days a week up here normally, usually weekends, but this holiday season is special. First, I am having my first chance to spend a lot of time with a wonderful woman named Sarah whom I recently met. But I also have a professional excuse.
I’m Mission Control.
The project that I’m mission control for is called BARREL (short for the Balloon ARray for Relativistic Electron Losses). This project is led by my friend Robyn Millan, who is a professor at Dartmouth College. The BARREL balloons are funded by NASA and are meant to study Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts: super-high-energy electrons are trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, and once in a while something kicks a bunch of them out and they come crashing down into the atmosphere. It’s not a danger to humanity or anything, but we want to know how and why it happens so as to understand the physics of the radiation belts better. The balloons will see x-rays that the electrons make when they hit the atmosphere.
Is it astronomy? I don’t know. The physics that happens in the radiation belts must also happen in a lot of bigger, more glamorous places out in the cosmos. And the radiation belts are closer, so we can get a much better look at them. But to look at it another way, I’m an astronomer and NASA is funding it and I think it’s cool, so I will blog about it among my other projects unless someone stops me 
Right now we have one test payload hitchhiking a ride on an experimental “ultra-long-duration” balloon (ULDB) that NASA is testing in Antarctica. ULDB is a new kind of balloon that is supposed to stay aloft for up to 100 days at a float altitude of 33.5 km (110000 feet). This image from NASA shows an artist’s conception of the ULDB at float:
My job is to monitor the data coming down to the ground here at Berkeley. Our mission control center isn’t very impressive: a 6 inch antenna sitting on the roof, with a cable coming through the window into an ordinary PC that is sitting on a cardboard box instead of a table. But it gets the job done (when we have our real campaigns in 2012 and 2013 we’ll have up to 20 balloons flying at once and a proper mission control room). We get a packet of data every second from the balloon. NASA gets its own data from another transmitter, and you can see where the balloon is RIGHT NOW by looking at this webpage:
http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon4/balloon4.htm
January 3rd, 2009 at 4:10 am
Awesome looking balloon! And it is huge!
January 5th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Sorry, but I have to ask… Are you the David Smith who I had in class at MIT in the early 1980s?
January 8th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Excellent post, David. And I’m not the only one that thinks so - check this out! http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2009/01/2009-the-intern.html
January 10th, 2009 at 8:12 am
To Brother Guy: yes, it’s me! (It was many years ago that I took planetary science from him, and we were both young, and he wasn’t a Brother yet. It was a really fun course. I remember as a term project we made up two teams representing alien species and had to try to communicate with each other. Yes, we also learned a lot about actual planets, too).
To Lee: thank you for the kind words, and for pointing out that link!! My mom will be proud