I am a Research Scholar and Lecturer in Physics at Princeton University, working on the balloon-borne telescopes. These include SPIDER, SuperBIT, and Taurus (Tau’r’us). As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I also worked on BLASTpol. This is a place for photographs that I, and others, take along the way.
Most of these photos, and many others, are available on my Flickr account
List of adventures:
- 2023 Following several engineering test flights, SuperBIT is ready to do science! Launching on a super-pressure balloon from Wanaka, New Zealand
- 2022 Then Spider goes to McMurdo Station, Antarctica for its second long-duration science flight
- 2022 After waiting for many years, an upgraded Spider goes back to Texas in advance of another flight
- 2019 SuperBIT’s science-quality test flight, with a fancy new telescope designed for balloons rather than people’s back yards. (no posts)
- 2018 SuperBIT completed its final engineering flight from Palestine, TX (no posts, due to continued demoralization from previous year)
- 2017 With another SuperBIT test flight campaign the following year (during which we did not launch, after trying for months from both Palestine, TX and Fort Sumner, NM)
- 2016 I join SuperBIT’s first engineering test flight from a NASA balloon launching from Palestine, TX.
- 2014 Followed by SPIDER’s long-awaited Antarctic flight campaign! (after a frustrating year-long delay due to government shutdown)
- 2013 At long last, and on a new note, SPIDER has deployed to the field. As before, this starts with a mission readiness campaign in Palestine, TX
- 2012 Followed, naturally, by another LDB campaign, at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
- 2012 Due to problems with the 2010 data, BLAST-Pol flies again. This means a return to Palestine, TX for an MRR campaign
- 2011 While in McMurdo with BLAST-Pol, I talked my way into a brief visit to work on the Keck Array (aka SPUD) at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
- 2010 Following on the heels of MRR, Blast-Pol’s LDB (Long Duration Balloon) Antarctic Campaign
- 2010 The first adventurous adventure: MRR (Mission Readiness Review) for BLAST-Pol in Palestine, TX.
- 2009 The first “adventure” was initial integration of Spider and BLAST-Pol at home in Toronto.
About the Experiments
SuperBIT (Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope) is a visible light telescope, kind of like the Hubble Space Telescope on a balloon. It flies above most of the atmosphere to eliminate the “seeing” that causes stars to twinkle and look distorted at high resolution. SuperBIT’s goal is to make wide-field images of clusters of galaxies and infer the quantitiy and distribution of dark matter using gravitational lensing. It is also to show that this kind of observation is possible from a balloon, and blaze the trail for more ambitious instruments.
Spider (Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust, and the Epoch of Reionization—my first scientific acronym creation, now deprecated) is a large scale polarimeter of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is radiant heat leftover from the big bang and provides a snapshot of the universe at about 300,000 years old—over 13 billion years ago! Spider’s primary goal is to detect the imprint of gravity waves produced just after the big bang, when the universe underwent a phase of rapidly accelerating expansion.
BLASTpol (Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for polarization) is the resurrection of BLAST, which was mostly destroyed at the end of its last flight. BLAST looks at thermal emission from cold interstellar dust, and its rebuilding adds the capability to measure polarization. This can be used to study magnetic fields in regions of star formation in our galaxy.
About the site
The name “Dropping BallAst” does not refer to any intention of quitting balloon astrophysics (even if sometimes I wish I had). Rather, “dropping” is meant in the sense of “dropping an album”. Also, it’s a pun: you see, the balloons drop ballast to control altitude. I like puns.
Some measure of inspiration for this site is taken from these campaign journals, which document the previous exploits of BLAST.
The logo image for the site is BLAST at float, caught through a telescope by Joe Martz.
Warning: due to hard drive failures (and inadequate backups) some older posts are scrambled.