NASA’s ComPair balloon mission readies for flight

A crew in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is getting ready to fly a balloon-borne science instrument referred to as ComPair, which can take a look at new applied sciences for detecting gamma rays, the highest-energy type of mild.

ComPair is slated to fly early in NASA’s 2023 fall scientific balloon marketing campaign, which opens on Thursday, Aug. 10, climate allowing.

“Numerous attention-grabbing science occurs within the vitality vary that ComPair is designed to review,” mentioned Nicholas Kirschner, a graduate scholar at George Washington College in Washington and NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland, who works on the mission. “These gamma rays are arduous to seize with current strategies, so we have to create and take a look at new ones. ComPair’s flight will get us one step nearer to placing an identical detector in space.”

ComPair detects gamma rays with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts. Seen mild’s vitality falls between 2 and three electron volts, for comparability.

Supernovae and highly effective explosions referred to as gamma-ray bursts shine the brightest on this vitality vary. It is also the place astronomers count on to see the strongest glow from probably the most large and distant energetic galaxies, that are powered by monster black holes. Present missions do not cowl this vary effectively, nonetheless, so future ComPair-inspired devices may fill in vital gaps in astronomers’ data.

Earth’s ambiance filters out many of the high-energy radiation coming from space—which is nice for people however makes testing new gamma-ray applied sciences difficult. ComPair’s answer is to fly to about 133,000 toes (40,000 meters) on a scientific balloon, which brings it above 99.5% of the ambiance.

After constructing and testing ComPair at Goddard, the mission crew shipped it to Fort Sumner. There, they unpacked, reassembled, and recalibrated the instrument.

ComPair will piggyback with one other mission, referred to as GRAPE (Gamma-Ray Polarimeter Experiment), led by the College of New Hampshire. After ComPair and GRAPE are on the gondola, the framework that may connect to the scientific balloon, the groups can put together for launch.

ComPair will get its identify from two strategies it makes use of to review gamma rays: Compton scattering and pair manufacturing. In Compton scattering, mild hits a particle, corresponding to an electron, and transfers some vitality to it. Pair manufacturing happens when a gamma ray grazes the nucleus of an atom and converts right into a pair of particles—an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

“Gamma rays are too high-energy for a conventional telescope to detect—the sunshine flies proper between the mirror’s atoms,” mentioned Regina Caputo, ComPair undertaking supervisor at Goddard. “As a substitute, our instrument makes use of layers of various sorts of parts and compounds stacked on high of one another. As gamma rays move by means of the instrument, they work together with completely different layers relying on their energies.”

The instrument has 4 main parts:

• A tracker containing 10 layers of silicon detectors that determines the place of incoming gamma rays.
• A high-resolution calorimeter fabricated from cadmium, zinc, and telluride that exactly measures lower-energy Compton-scattered gamma rays and a few transformed into electron-positron pairs.
• A high-energy calorimeter fabricated from cesium iodide that principally measures electron-positron pairs in addition to some Compton-scattered gamma rays.
• An anticoincidence detector that notes the entry of high-energy charged particles referred to as cosmic rays.

“Cosmic rays are in every single place within the universe—massive numbers collide with each a part of Earth’s ambiance each second of each day. In addition they run into spacecraft, together with gamma-ray missions” mentioned Richard Woolf, a analysis physicist on the U.S. Naval Analysis Laboratory (NRL) in Washington. “As a result of they’re charged, cosmic rays can journey gamma-ray detectors, together with future ComPair-inspired ones. So, we want anticoincidence detectors to filter them out.”

ComPair is a collaboration amongst Goddard, NRL, Brookhaven Nationwide Laboratory in Upton, New York, and Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory in New Mexico.

NASA’s scientific balloons provide frequent, low-cost entry to near-space to conduct scientific investigations and expertise maturation in fields corresponding to astrophysics, heliophysics, and atmospheric analysis, in addition to coaching for the subsequent technology of leaders in engineering and science. To observe the missions within the 2023 Fort Sumner fall marketing campaign, go to NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) web site for real-time updates of a balloon’s altitude and GPS location throughout flight.