Launch at Last!

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Our next opportunity finally arrived two weeks later. Having been through two “dress rehearsals,” we knew what to expect. 

The procedure was to lay out the balloon on a protective tarp on the runway.  The topmost section of the balloon, a small portion that would become the “bubble”, was fed through a retaining “spool” and folded back on itself.  The top section had two tubes, made of balloon material, through which helium would be fed, inflating the bubble, which would gradually ease up from the tarp, eventually becoming large enough to lift itself off the ground entirely, with only the spool and the tension from the uninflated remainder keeping it in place.

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Off Duty, Styrofoam Insulation, False Starts

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Off Duty

While the wind blew, the various research groups and the launch crew prepared and tested their experiments and rigs, like fishermen mending nets to get ready for the next big catch.  At the end of each day we would check the wind conditions and then give up for the day, leaving the airport to seek dinner and retire to our rooms at the Super-8 for a few hours of personal time and sleep before repeating the routine the next day. 

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Instrument Troubleshooting, Feeding the Magnet

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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.  

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Setting up Shop, Monitoring the Weather

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Setting 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.  

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Launching CRISIS

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This 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.

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The Universe in 3D

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I 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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A New Host for Thor’s Life Notes

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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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Bill Glass is Gone

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Bill Glass and I participate in a welcome ritual for tourist visitors to Kenya, 2013.

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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The Twins Paradox – a lifelong puzzle

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When I was studying physics in college, one of the early subjects was Einstein’s special relativity theory.  The subject is called “relativity” because it explains the physics of objects moving relative to each other.  It is “special” because it only applies to uniform relative motion, not motion induced by gravity, which is covered by “general” relativity, which Einstein described a decade later.

Special relativity replaced Galileo’s and Isaac Newton’s earlier theories, which were superb at explaining falling objects and orbiting planets, but had run into trouble explaining the properties of fast-moving electrons and light.

It is an early subject in the physics curriculum because as students, we were just learning the techniques of calculus and linear algebra; techniques that are helpful, but not required to understand special relativity.  Most people are familiar with special relativity, and even if they don’t understand the details, they have heard “E=mc2”, one of the consequences of it.  They may also have heard about time dilation, the effect of a moving clock slowing down relative to a stationary one.

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Open Pits and Bathtubs

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I had to agree that it was an unusual gas station. 

It looked like an airport control tower with a cantilevered roof that protected the customers at the gas pumps – protection from rain and sun that is common today but in 1978, and certainly 20 years earlier when built, it was novel.  The pumps were fueling the local cars:  a mix of old gas guzzlers and newer more fuel-efficient models that were a response to the oil embargos of the 70s.

We were on the way to our business destination—the US Steel mine near Mountain Iron Minnesota, a town slowly being eaten up by the open pit mine as it followed the deposits of diffuse iron known as taconite.

I was the passenger in Steve Haverberg’s VW microbus.  Steve was familiar with the area and knew I would enjoy seeing a gas station that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  We needed gas anyway and it was a good time to stop and stretch. 

Another vehicle was also on its way to the mine, but had taken a more direct route.  It was equipped with a 4-foot long cylindrical probe, to be lowered by cable into a drill hole.  A custom-built instrument specialized for detecting iron ore was also in that truck.

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