This time, Nowak said, they hope to launch from a regional airport. If the weather cooperates and the winds aren’t too gusty, it could be an ideal spot.
Nowak said the project gives students extraordinary experiences and new insight into how they can apply what they’re learning in classes to many kinds of challenges.
“For the physics majors in particular, it helps them understand how to put together an experimental program,” he said. “The system is too complex for one individual to get it all set and put together and deployed. You need that team effort.”
Team effort is an essential piece of the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, which includes students from more than 70 institutions, divided into 53 groups, which are subdivided further into “pods.” UD’s pod includes the University of Bridgeport, Drexel University and Olin College, among others.
It's primarily an engineering project, Nowak said.
“They’re kind of experts,” he said. “They have each designed certain subsystems.”
Data gathered by UD’s balloon will support atmospheric research in general and the search for eclipse-induced atmospheric gravity waves in particular.
The cosmic watch
The Eclipse Chasers will collect data that leverages Blue Hen research, too. The team has assembled a customized particle detector with assistance from Spencer Axani, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, who studies particle physics, cosmic rays and nuclear physics.
Millie Dill, a physics major from Milford, Delaware, and Allison Fantom, a senior physics major from Wappingers Falls, New York, worked out a way to include that detector, which they call a “cosmic watch,” in the balloon’s payload. Dill worked on the portable, battery-operated detector during UD’s winter break.
A cosmic watch is nothing like a wristwatch or a fitness tracker. It’s a detector, a sensor, capturing observations the way you might on a whale watch expedition or as part of a bird watchers’ backyard census.
This instrument will detect the presence of extraordinary particles called muons (pronounced MOO-ons).
They want to know if the conditions found in a total solar eclipse will change the rate at which the muons strike the detector. This is an opportunity to collect information that might help us understand more about muons.
What is known is that muons are fundamental particles, not composed of any smaller particles. They are subatomic — which means they are smaller than atoms — and they have a very short lifespan, about two-millionths of a second. To understand that, consider that it takes about a third of a second to blink your eyes one time. By then, 700,000 muons have lived and died.
You might think they can’t get far in that ridiculously short lifespan, but you would be ever so wrong.
Muons are born when cosmic rays (high-speed particles from our sun, from outside our solar system or from distant galaxies) collide with other particles (such as gas, dust, smoke and other pollutants) in Earth’s atmosphere. Muons travel at almost the speed of light and cover a great distance during their short lifetime, passing through almost any substance and reaching as far as a mile below the surface of the Earth. When their lives are over, they decay into electrons and/or neutrinos.
Mission critical solutions
On Monday, during the eclipse, Dill and Bieber will work at the team’s ground station, its central communications device that connects the balloon’s instruments with an Iridium GPS tracker, controlled by Iridium’s satellite network.
How do you communicate with a helium balloon when it’s 13 miles up in the sky? Bieber sends an email to the Iridium network, from which the nearest Iridium satellite will beam a message to a modem flying with the balloon, which tells the balloon’s instruments what to do and when.
For example, the satellite will send commands, telling the balloon’s payload to open a vent to release helium when the balloon has reached the optimal altitude. That stops the balloon’s ascent and allows it to float steadily at that height.
Then, when the total eclipse has moved on, another email will be sent to the satellite, which will relay the command to cut the balloon free of its payload string. Parachutes will slow the descent of the payloads and prevent damage to the contents.
UD’s Colin Moses, a sophomore from Aberdeen, Maryland, majoring in physics and applied mathematics, worked extensively on the payload containers that hold the sensors and other electronic instruments that are so critical to collecting data. There were plenty of complications to sort out.
For example, how do you pack those instruments snugly into containers without breaking anything? How do you cool the containers if they get too warm and how do you control the moisture inside the containers so condensation doesn’t mess with the instruments?
Moses figured out a way to customize the containers and chain-link them together, engineered little fans that could cool the payload containers and found a way to use silica packets to keep moisture from messing with the delicate electronics. He also created a new mount system for the camera system.
Not a bad start, especially considering this was Moses’ first research project at UD.
“It has been a good experience to take what I’ve been learning and apply it,” he said.
Dill said the engineering aspects of the work were especially appealing to her.
She said she has worked mostly on the Raspberry Pi components, using that small, low-cost computer system to enable data collection and control the balloon’s camera to livestream video to NASA’s channel.
“What I was looking for in joining the engineering team was to see how I can face a problem — to see how I would fix it, what resources we need, and the general research, too.” she said. “I did a lot of reading, and the team from Montana State provided each step of the process. It was really interesting and continues to be.
“You need a growth mindset with science,” she added. “You have to be able to work past your failures.”
And whatever happens Monday, Bieber is excited about the possibilities that lie ahead.
“This is a NASA-sponsored project, and I’m a fan of that agency,” he said. “Maybe I’d like to be employed there someday.”
Blue skies, Eclipse Chasers all.