The Mission Ends
I would not stay around to see the mission end. Once the instrument was airborne, there was no further purpose for our lab in the airplane hangar, and my job title became moving man and trucker. The packing went ok, but on the way home I ran into another weather condition: severe thunderstorms. Driving the broad-sided truck east on Highway 12, it was a challenge to keep it in my lane. The rain slowed me down but fortunately, the wind was not enough to blow me over. I thought about how fickle the spring weather in the Midwest could be. After weeks of steady wind, the short window of calm that permitted a balloon launch was followed by a gale force blast, perhaps to compensate and bring the average wind speed back up to the South Dakota standard.
I learned later that the balloon carrying our instrument had drifted west, accumulating 56 hours of data. It eventually was radio-commanded to cut its cables and release the payload, which descended by parachute and was retrieved in the high plateau of central Washington.
I also learned later about the other missions we shared hangar-lab space with. With the departure of WUSTL, the next launch opportunity now belonged to Berkeley. Five weeks after our successful CRISIS mission, they were able to launch their superconducting magnet. This time it successfully rose to the stratosphere and started collecting data. After a few hours, the balloon failed. The entire package and its parachute, entangled and encumbered by the corpse of the balloon, free-fell to Earth and was destroyed.
WUSTL had been prescient—that might have been their balloon had they stayed. They did have a launch later that year, during the fall turnaround, successfully launching from Pierre, South Dakota.
Remarkably, enough data was recovered from the wreckage of the Berkeley instrument for it to be considered a success! The data gathered from our CRISIS project was reported over the next years in scientific journals and conferences. Our results, along with other similar experiments, contributed to early understandings of the makeup of cosmic rays.
AfterNotes
It has been nearly 50 years since that eventful spring. In gathering my memories for this story I relied on indirect clues from the photos I took. I also was able to track down Chuck Gilman, now retired after a fascinating career in high energy physics. Our reconnection and reminiscences revealed additional background information. There are still some questions which could be resolved by a few key people. Sadly, our professor mentors, Phyllis Freier and Jake Waddington have passed away.
Instead, we can query the internet. One of the rich sources of information was a database of research balloon launches around the world since 1947. I was able to locate the launches in 1977 conducted from South Dakota. From those records, and the sequence of the snapshots I made that spring, I was able to reconstruct this account.
It had been a remarkable experience for me, a young physics and engineering student starting his career. It reinforced a growing suspicion I had that experiments and measurements in physics required proficiency in instrumentation. I pursued that course, combining the disciplines of physics and electronics, and was rewarded with a fascinating and satisfying career. It had many highlights, but nothing as unique as what I experienced waiting six weeks for the wind to die down in Aberdeen South Dakota to launch a cosmic ray research balloon.
References
Wikipedia’s entry for Phyllis Freier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_S._Freier
Obituary for Jake Waddington
https://cse.umn.edu/physics/news/remembering-cecil-jake-waddington-1929-2020
“Detection of the isotopes of heavy cosmic ray nuclei”, Gilman, C. M. & Waddington, C. J.
https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1975ICRC….9.3166G/0003167.000.html
Wikipedia entry explaining nuclear emulsion detector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_emulsion
An introduction to the jetstream
https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/global/jet-stream
NASA’s scientific balloon program
https://www.nasa.gov/scientificballoons
History of Super-8 hotels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_8_(hotel)
Scientific balloon launch database
https://stratocat.com.ar/globos/indexe.html
Papers
“Detection of the isotopes of heavy cosmic ray nuclei”, C. M. Gilman, C. J. Waddington
https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1975ICRC…14.3166G
“Isotopes of Cosmic Ray Elements from Neon to Nickel”, Waddington, C. J., Freier, P. S., Fickle, R. K., & Brewster, N. R
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1981IAUS…94…33W
“The elemental and isotopic composition of cosmic rays – Silicon to nickel”, Young, J. S., Freier, P. S., Waddington, C. J., Brewster, N. R., & Fickle, R. K.
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1981ApJ…246.1014Y
“The Charge and Energy Spectra of Heavy Cosmic Ray Nuclei”, W.R. Scarlett, Phyllis S. Freier and C. Jake Waddington
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19780021088/downloads/19780021088.pdf
Other researchers
The Berkeley flight that ended in disaster but yielded data
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dne1vjhys02nr43848ipq/133N-mayo-77-freefall_1977084251.pdf?rlkey=u4e8ttrngauw9p8g4wc80xgtw&e=1&dl=0
“A measurement of cosmic-ray beryllium isotopes from 200 to 1500 MeV per nucleon”, Buffington, A., Orth, C. D., & Mast, T. S.
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1978ApJ…226..355B
The research group- from Washington University in St Louis (WUSTL) “Ultra-heavy cosmic ray detector”
https://stratocat.com.ar/fichas-e/1977/PIR-19770913.htm