NASA’s ComPair gamma-ray hunting mission prepares for balloon flight

Engineers and scientists have shipped NASA’s ComPair instrument to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, forward of its scheduled August flight early in NASA’s 2023 fall balloon marketing campaign.

ComPair’s purpose is to check new applied sciences for finding out gamma rays, the highest-energy type of gentle. It was assembled and examined at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“The gamma-ray power vary we’re concentrating on with ComPair is not nicely coated by present observatories,” mentioned Carolyn Kierans, the instrument’s principal investigator at Goddard. “We hope that after a profitable balloon take a look at flight, future variations of the applied sciences will likely be utilized in space-based missions.”

ComPair is designed to detect gamma rays with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts. (For comparability, the power of seen gentle is 2 to three electron volts.) Supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, essentially the most highly effective explosions within the cosmos, glow brightest on this vary, as do essentially the most large and distant energetic galaxies, that are powered by supermassive black holes. Scientists know this as a result of they see a fraction of the sunshine emitted by these galaxies with NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray House Telescope, which observes higher-energy gamma rays.

ComPair will get its identify from the 2 methods it detects and measures gamma rays: Compton scattering and pair manufacturing. Compton scattering happens when gentle hits a particle, akin to an electron, and transfers some power to it. Pair manufacturing occurs when a gamma ray grazes the nucleus of an atom. The interplay converts the gamma ray right into a pair of particles—an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

The ComPair instrument has 4 main parts:

• A tracker containing 10 layers of silicon detectors that determines the positions of incoming gamma rays
• A high-resolution calorimeter that exactly measures lower-energy Compton-scattered gamma rays
• One other calorimeter that measures the higher-energies of electron-positron pairs
• An anticoincidence detector that notes the entry of high-energy charged particles known as cosmic rays, permitting ComPair’s different devices to disregard them

The mission group assembled all of the parts and examined them in a big thermal vacuum chamber at Goddard to evaluate how they’re going to operate at balloon altitudes. The following step is to fly the instrument. The flight will carry ComPair to a top of about 133,000 toes (40,000 meters), or practically 4 occasions the cruising altitude of a industrial airliner.

ComPair will piggyback with one of many main balloon payloads that can fly throughout NASA’s annual Fort Sumner balloon marketing campaign. NASA’s scientific balloons provide frequent, low-cost entry to near-space to conduct scientific investigations and know-how maturation in fields akin to astrophysics, heliophysics, and atmospheric analysis, in addition to coaching for the subsequent technology of leaders in engineering and science.

ComPair is a collaboration amongst Goddard, the Naval Analysis Laboratory in Washington, Brookhaven Nationwide Laboratory in Upton, New York, and Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in New Mexico.