Dec 5 2007
From The Space Library
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate awarded a US$9.3 million contract to Dartmouth College of Hanover, New Hampshire, to conduct a project using more than 40 high-altitude balloons to capture data about Earth’s Van Allen Belts. The Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses (BARREL) would fly in 2013 or 2014 in conjunction with NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes satellites, scheduled to launch in 2011. Under the terms of the contract, the mission’s Principal Investigator Robyn M. Millan and her team would conduct test flights of the balloons and their instrumentation. In 2013 the team would launch 20 balloons from South African and British research stations in Antarctica, at a rate of one per day. Each balloon, separated by approximately 620 miles (998 kilometers) and carried by winds, would float at an altitude of approximately 21 miles (34 kilometers) for as long as two weeks, forming a ring encircling the South Pole. In the first experiment of its kind working in tandem with a satellite mission, the balloons would use sensors to measure the influx of radiation from the Van Allen Belts into Earth’s atmosphere. Millan and her team would repeat the procedure with 20 more balloons the following year.
NASA, “NASA To Use Balloon Flotilla To Study Radiation That Affects Earth,” news release 07-265, 5 December 2007, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/dec/HQ_07265_Balloons_and_Van_Allen_Belts.html (accessed 20 October 2007); Kristen Senz, “Dartmouth Professor Gets $9.3 Million NASA Grant,” Manchester Union Leader (NH), 14 December 2007.
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