We (sample) them directly before they are broken up in the atmosphere.”ĬREAM will be sensitive to cosmic rays with higher energies than previous cosmic ray detectors flown in space, including the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer delivered to the space station on the second-to-last space shuttle flight in 2011. We identify (cosmic rays) particle-by-particle, tell what they are, how much energy they have, and characterize them. “The original cosmic rays, for you to detect them, you have to fly an instrument in space,” Seo said. The most energetic cosmic rays can penetrate all the way to Earth’s surface, but detectors on the ground only pick up the leftovers generated from collisions with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, producing “air showers” of secondary particles the rain down on the planet. Scientists will trace the shower of secondary particles generated by each cosmic ray’s crash into the instrument’s cross section of pixels and targets. Credit: Faye Levine/University of Marylandĭozens of stacked layers of silicon pixels, carbon targets, tungsten planes and scintillating fibers will detect particles, ranging from subatomic units of relatively light hydrogen to heavy iron, coming from deep space and determine their mass, charge and trajectory.Įach cosmic ray comes with its own backstory, and the particles will reveal clues about their origins as they collide with the matter inside CREAM’s detector. Eun-Suk Seo, University of Maryland professor of physics, stands in an on-campus control room. Engineers modified the existing science payload for the rigors of spaceflight, finishing the instrument for as little as $10 million to $20 million, Seo said, a fraction of the cost of a standalone space mission or an instrument developed from scratch.Ĭhanges to the balloon-borne instrument, managed at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, included making the on-board electronics more robust against radiation, and ensuring the package could survive the shaking of a rocket launch. Scientists have flown variants of the CREAM instrument seven times on balloon research missions, logging more than six months of flight time. “Cosmic rays are direct samples of matter from outside our solar system, possibly from the most distant reaches of the universe,” said Eun-Suk Seo, lead scientist on the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass, or CREAM, instrument and a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. Cosmic rays are not a form of light like gamma-rays or X-rays, but bits of matter sent careening through space by powerful forces elsewhere in our galaxy and beyond. Physicists are gearing up to send a re-engineered science instrument originally designed for lofty balloon flights high in Earth’s atmosphere to the International Space Station next week to broaden their knowledge of cosmic rays, subatomic particles traveling on intergalactic routes that could hold the key to unlocking mysteries about supernovas, black holes, pulsars and dark matter.įastened in the cargo bay of a SpaceX Dragon capsule, the cosmic ray observatory will be robotically connected to a port outside the space station’s Japanese Kibo laboratory for a three-year science campaign sampling cosmic rays, particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light by violent and mysterious forces in the distant universe.įirst discovered more than a century ago, most cosmic rays are blocked by the atmosphere from reaching Earth’s surface, requiring scientists to send up detectors on high-altitude balloon flights or space missions. Credit: NASA/ESA/Arizona State University Recent research shows that galactic cosmic rays flowing into our solar system originate in clusters like these. This mosaic image of Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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