Revitalizing NASA's Suborbital Program Advancing Science, Driving Innovation, and Developing Workforce (2010) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
3 NASA's Balloon Research Capabilities
3 NASA's Balloon Research Capabilities
Pages 21-33
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 21... ...
The flights are conducted by the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, a government-owned, contractor-operated (New Mexico State University) facility located in Palestine, Texas, where payload integration and test and balloon flight operations are carried out.
|
From page 22... ...
There have been many other productive CMB flights, many of them serving as test-beds of advanced technol ogy for future space missions (see Table 3.1)
|
From page 23... ...
-- Small Astronomy Satellite 2 GSFC 1960s NaI scintillation gamma-ray spectrometer -- Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer -- Mars 4 and 5 Johnson, NRL 1970- High Energy Astronomy Observatory UCSD/MIT Hard X-ray/Low-Energy Gamma-Ray Engineering Flight -- Peterson, UCSD; Kniffen, Experiment -- HEAO 1 GSFC; Hofstadter, Stanford 1970-1973 Cooled germanium detector for gamma rays -- Gamma-ray Line Spectrometer -- HEAO 3 Jacobson, JPL 1970-1973 Measure cosmic-ray charge spectrum -- Koch, Isotopic Composition of Primary Cosmic Rays Peters, Danish Space Research Institute; Parnell, Experiment -- HEAO 3 MSFC 1970-1977 Ionization and Cherenkov detection of very Heavy Nuclei Experiment -- HEAO 3 heavy cosmic rays -- Israel, Washington Univ.; Stone, JPL; Waddington, University of Minnesota 1975-1978 Hard X-ray CsI (Na) Scintillation Counter, (HXRBS)
|
From page 24... ...
-- High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager -- RHESSI Crannell, GSFC 1978-1992 GRIS-Gamma Ray Imaging Spectrometer -- Germanium Detector Pulse-shape-discriminator, Teegarden, Tueller, GSFC; HEXAGONE -- Coded aperture imaging -- INTEGRAL Matteson, UCSD 1973-1980 IR Observations, Far-IR detectors -- Fazio, 40 in IR telescope -- Spitzer Harvard 2003 In-Focus -- Tueller, GSFC CdZnTe (CZT) detectors -- SWIFT 1985-1990 ClO and O3 stratospheric profiles, balloon (MLS)
|
From page 25... ...
. The technology for essentially every high-energy instrument flown on a space mission has been developed on balloon projects.
|
From page 26... ...
instrument, a quarter-scale version of ACCESS (Advance Cosmic ray Composition Experiment for the Space Station) , was developed for ULDBs and has already flown on four Antarctic LDBs lasting 42, 29, 29, and 19 days for a total exposure of 118 days.
|
From page 27... ...
FIGURE 3.3 Launch in June 2009 of Sunrise, a solar telescope with a primary mirror of 1-m diameter feeding an ultraviolet imager and a vector magnetograph, using a correlation tracker feeding an agile mirror to provide 50 km spatial resolution, three times better than the state-of-the-art Hinode space mission, and the best ever for solar physics. It also observes the Sun at ultraviolet wavelengths between 200 and 400 nm, where the brightness of small-scale magnetic structures dominates the variations of total solar irradiance.
|
From page 28... ...
Balloon measurements have also played an important role in satellite correlative measurements and validation beginning formally with the Correlative Measurements Program of NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite. Since that time, balloon measurements have been a part of the various airborne science and validation campaigns conducted for NASA's Aura satellite as well as for European and Japanese satellites.
|
From page 29... ...
. Currently, most astrophysics, solar physics, and geospace science balloon projects use conventional short balloon flights primarily for engineering tests and payload qualification.
|
From page 30... ...
These times are short enough so that projects can be built and flown as graduate student thesis projects. The fast development times also mean that balloon projects provide an outstanding opportunity to train students/young engineers in mission design and project management, while conducting cutting-edge scientific research.
|
From page 31... ...
of the European Space Agency's Planck mission have flown balloons, as did a large number of people now working on the next-generation CMB satellite plans; and PIs for high-energy astro physics space missions and instruments, such as the PI of NuSTAR, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) professor Fiona Harrison; the PI of the Swift Mission, NASA Goddard Astroparticle Physics laboratory chief Neil Gehrels; the mission scientist for LISA and former chief scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech pro fessor Thomas Prince; and the PIs of all the instruments on the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory.
|
From page 32... ...
Thus, increasing the number and capability of LDB flights is a high priority. Both an additional payload support building (for the assembly and testing of balloon payloads)
|
From page 33... ...
For a solar hard x-ray/gamma-ray observatory-class mission, the ~100-day duration of ULDBs is needed to catch the rare large solar gamma-ray flares. Finding: All science areas in NASA's purview can benefit from an expanded LDB program, especially to midlatitude, and possibly tropic, flights and new breakthrough science can clearly be achieved with ULDB flights.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.