Seven, Mars, Three Weeks discussed on Scientific Sense
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Go ahead. It's also cheap labor and cheap labor to be a graduate student. You know you have to you have to be able to Solder and live off of a you know a fairly low stipend but It's it. It's also really useful for testing new technologies for nasa for spaceflight. So this was one of the the main sort of tests for Connecticut inducted detectors as technology to be used on future space missions and in that it was very successful because we launched we got to float we made some observations. We measured the detector response and the response of the electron. Ix and everything was working well and so that counts as nasa says check. This technology has been tested and is now suitable to be proposed to fly on a space mission unfortunately on launch. We had an incident where there's a caller that holds the balloon when they launch it that that is released after launch and usually. That's fine but I guess one out of every between twenty and one hundred launches the collar when it falls a hits the payload who'd and that's what happened to us it. It hit the payload and then about ten hours after we arrived. We got to our altitude up to thirty five kilometers. A piece that had been damaged presumably In that Launch a piece structural piece broke and we were no longer able to point the telescope so We only got about ten or twelve hours of data instead of three weeks hoping for i would imagine. Fill out this is a very large balloon is a helium balloon. That goes all up to what heights. Yeah so about thirty five kilometers height so an airplane is flying like seven or eight kilometers. The the yes about one hundred and twenty five thousand feet I guess though about ten times you know a typical sort of tall mountain right Higher and It's not quite in space but At that at that height the sky even when the sun is up is is completely black Very little atmosphere. As i said there's is about three mil- bars it's it's a slim similar to or maybe slightly more than a slightly less than the atmospheric pressure on the surface of mars So it's a it's enough in space that you can basically do a lot of astronomy that you would normally need to be in orbit to do but you can do More cheaply from the balloon and But as i said it's it's also a riskier. I think than Than the normal launches of of satellite telecoms. So so that the mission that you've flew you got some data you see here. polarized thermal emission from interstellar dust revealing magnetic field structures in nearby giant monitor clouds of debris actually get some data from the mission that that flew up me. We did we. We scanned across We did some scans on the sky when we were still able to two point and we detected in while you can see it while we were there and since we've been working on doing more detailed map reconstruction of the of the data After the flying. So we have some sources that we've measured We've also got from a previous flight. Where we we measured some sources And magnetic fields Or polarized estimation and then inferred information about magnetic fields in star forming regions. We obviously didn't get as much data as as we wanted to..