NASA scientists in Antarctica are all set to launch SuperTIGER Balloon, a balloon-borne instrument, to study heavy cosmic particles, collects information on cosmic rays that enter Earth’s atmosphere every day. The announcement was made by NASA on 6 December 2017.
The instrument, called the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (SuperTIGER), is designed to study rare heavy nuclei, which hold clues about where and how cosmic rays attain speeds up to nearly the speed of light. It will be launched on December 10.
“Heavy elements, like the gold in your jewelry, are produced through special processes in stars, and SuperTIGER aims to help us understand how and where this happens,” said lead co-investigator John Mitchell at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“We’re all stardust, but figuring out where and how this stardust is made helps us better understand our galaxy and our place in it,” Mitchell said. The previous flight of SuperTIGER lasted 55 days, setting a record for the longest flight of any heavy-lift scientific balloon.
“The time aloft translated into a long exposure, which is important because the particles we’re after makeup only a tiny fraction of cosmic rays,” said Robert Binns, the principal investigator at Washington University in the US, which leads the mission.
The most common cosmic ray particles are protons or hydrogen nuclei, making up roughly 90 percent, followed by helium nuclei (8 percent) and electrons (1 percent). The remainder contains the nuclei of other elements, with dwindling numbers of heavy nuclei as their mass rises. With SuperTIGER, researchers are looking for the rarest of the rare – so-called ultra-heavy cosmic ray nuclei beyond iron, from cobalt to barium.
“Within the last few years, it has become apparent that some or all of the very neutron-rich elements heavier than iron may be produced by neutron star mergers instead of supernovas,” said co-investigator Jason Link at Goddard.
When a cosmic ray strikes the nucleus of a molecule of atmospheric gas, both explode in a shower of subatomic shrapnel that triggers a cascade of particle collisions. Some of these secondary particles reach detectors on the ground, providing information scientists can use to infer the properties of the original cosmic ray.