Instrument Troubleshooting
Cosmic ray instruments are complex and it seems there is always something that needs adjusting or fixing or calibrating, and then testing and confirming and re-calibrating. This is what consumed our time while waiting for the wind to die down. And it is a good thing to have had that time to do those last ground tests, because we encountered a troubling condition—an intermittent false trigger.
Continue readingSetting up Shop
Scientific balloon launches have been part of NASA’s mission for over 30 years, but in 1977, they were conducted by NCAR– the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR maintained a balloon launching facility in Texas that had all of the equipment and resources to support experiments like ours. Unfortunately, Texas was too far south for our experiment. Instead, we would be operating from makeshift facilities in Aberdeen, a town of 25,000 in an area of South Dakota that offered low population, but enough infrastructure to meet our technical and launch requirements.
There was a regional airport outside of town, and an airplane hangar was provided to house our laboratory field station. We were not the only researchers, however. Groups from other universities were also trying to measure the properties of cosmic rays. We each had a section of the hangar to set up and prepare our experiments for launch. After packing up our instrument and all the essential support equipment from our 4th-floor lab in the Physics building into a rental truck and driving a day west on Highway 12, we arrived in Aberdeen. It took us several more days to recreate an operational cosmic ray field lab in the airplane hangar.
Continue readingThis is the beginning of a series of posts that describe the launching of a scientific balloon experiment in 1977. The story was reconstructed after encountering some old photos from that event. Reminiscences can run rather long, so I have partitioned it into more manageable segments. I hope you enjoy this snapshot of the scientific and cultural times of the 1970s.
Background
While attending the University of Minnesota, one of my part-time jobs was as a lab assistant in the Physics and Astronomy Department. I worked in a laboratory dedicated to the cosmic ray research group led by professors Phyllis Freier and C J (Jake) Waddington. In the group were lab manager Chuck Gilman and graduate student Bob Scarlett who were preparing an instrument to be launched and held aloft by a balloon to gather data about cosmic rays, a (still) mysterious radiation of high energy particles from deep outer space.
Continue readingI always had a mild interest in astronomy, and it became a strong interest in the 1990s, triggered by a homework assignment given to my ten-year-old son to go out at night and identify some constellations. I took him away from the city lights to a park where we could see the stars emerge from twilight. On that beautiful fall evening, we found the constellations he was looking for, and we also saw Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky. Through binoculars, we were surprised that we could see its moons. This caused me to wonder what else I might be able to see if I were to look a little closer.
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I started this blog when I retired in 2019, just before COVID. It was an activity that occupied me during those months of quarantine and allowed me to share my interests and projects. I was, and still am, ignorant of blogging technology. Yes, I have, in my career, written code for the world of web pages and browser-based applications, but every time I did so, I wondered, “How could this ever work?” It struck me as a house of cards, with fragile links and unreliable and inconsistent page renderings.
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Hard to believe. A man who was larger than life in our circle of friends and coworkers is gone. He was regarded as a wizard in our particular cohort of engineers, enabling computers to perform powerful tasks beyond everyone’s expectations. He was among the pioneers of computer graphics, a key contributor to a technology that garnered an Academy Award for motion picture special effects. If, in our work, we encountered an insoluble problem, it was assigned to Bill. Which he then solved.
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