A NASA high-altitude balloon flight earlier this yr served as reminder of an ever-important lesson: All the time again up your knowledge.
In April in Wānaka, New Zealand, researchers launched the Tremendous Stress Balloon Imaging Telescope, or SuperBIT, a balloon-based telescope that aimed to collect knowledge on dark-matter distribution by imaging colliding galaxies. SuperBIT floated on the fringe of the ambiance for 40 days gathering knowledge earlier than it returned to Earth. Upon touchdown, nevertheless, the balloon was considerably broken. What saved the day was two knowledge restoration techniques (whose specs the researchers just lately revealed) that earlier within the day had already parachuted all the way down to the Patagonia area of Argentina, rescuing greater than 200 gigabytes of SuperBIT observations.
“It’s like streaming Netflix down from the sting of house.”
—Richard Massey, Durham College, England
“For all the parts on the periodic desk, there’s about six instances as a lot darkish matter,” says Richard Massey, a professor of physics at Durham College in England. Darkish matter’s solely results on seen matter, famously, can solely be noticed not directly by means of gravitational results. “It’s a bit like finding out the wind,” Massey explains. “You may’t see the wind in the event you look exterior, however you possibly can see leaves blowing round.”
SuperBIT launched from Wānaka, New Zealand, on 16 April 2023.Invoice Rodman/NASA
SuperBIT has skilled its deal with galaxy clusters, the place lots of to 1000’s of galaxies bunch collectively, typically colliding. “We’re utilizing SuperBIT to map the place the bits fly, so we will hopefully determine what this invisible stuff is,” Massey says.
Floor-based telescopes don’t have the decision the researchers wanted to carry out these observations, and current house telescopes—which obtain a lot larger decision by avoiding scattering from the ambiance—use both too slim or too huge a subject of view. Dangling a telescope from a balloon greater than 30 kilometers up supplied a perfect resolution, reaching practically the identical decision as an area telescope at a fraction of the price. “It sounds just a little bit loopy, nevertheless it works remarkably properly,” says Ellen Sirks, a analysis affiliate on the College of Sydney. She started engaged on SuperBIT as a doctoral scholar of Massey.
Whereas telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb House Telescope price billions of {dollars}, balloon telescopes may be launched “at a college price range,” Sirks says.
Raspberry Pi by Parachute
Balloon-based telescopes current challenges too, equivalent to dependable knowledge retrieval. Usually, these telescopes beam down knowledge to floor stations or close by satellites. SuperBIT did so with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, however the telescope gathered an excessive amount of knowledge to be transmitted constantly for the complete flight.
“It’s like streaming Netflix down from the sting of house,” says Massey. With out a steady connection, that “streaming” was interrupted a number of instances in the course of the flight and misplaced about two weeks into the mission. Fortunately, the workforce had devised a bodily backup system, supplementing the satellite tv for pc connection and the telescope’s main laborious drives. The information had been copied onto the data-recovery system and dropped from the sky.
“It type of hearkens again to the Sixties and spy satellites,” Massey says. As a substitute of scientific knowledge on SD playing cards, these satellites dropped surveillance footage in movie cassettes.
The information-retrieval system consists of elements which are “comparatively commonplace,” Sirks says. For the electronics, it makes use of a Raspberry Pi compact pc together with an SD card with 5 terabytes of storage. The storage system is linked to the telescope’s onboard pc by way of Ethernet to constantly switch the information, and it’s hooked up to the telescope with mechanical pincers utilized by skilled archers and chosen due to their means to face up to excessive rigidity. “Generally, the only issues are one of the best options,” Sirk says.
SuperBIT’s Information Restoration System makes use of a Raspberry Pi.Ellen Sirks
When the astronomers are able to launch the system, they ship a message to the Raspberry Pi to start the method. Thirty seconds later, it slides off the telescope and begins the descent. A parachute opens to sluggish the autumn, and the Pi glides all the way down to Earth.
As a result of the balloon-based method is cheaper than launching a telescope into orbit, the researchers had been in a position to iterate the design and enhance their data-recovery system. So, whereas the fundamental design has been constant over the data-recovery system’s improvement, a number of the particulars have modified.
For instance, on a 2019 take a look at flight of SuperBIT and its knowledge restoration, Massey and Sirks had been shocked to search out that the Raspberry Pi was overheating—regardless of the frigid surroundings. Within the higher ambiance, Massey explains, “it’s -60 levels [Celsius], however electronics simply are likely to overheat and lower out.” The perpetrator was quickly found: Followers are often used to chill down these computer systems, however at that altitude, there’s hardly any air to move the warmth. Within the up to date model of the system, the researchers added a radiator system with a copper tube linking the pc to the encircling surroundings. That approach, the pc may emit warmth out into house and hold the system cool.
The information-recovery system can also be an excellent resolution for flights—like SuperBIT’s—that spend a very long time over our bodies of water, says Andrew Hamilton, the performing chief of NASA’s Balloon Program. In these flights, there’s a higher likelihood of dropping the telescope within the ocean, to allow them to’t depend on onboard laborious drives. Nevertheless, Hamilton says, the retrieval itself presents challenges: First, it’s important to get permission from the native air site visitors authority to drop the information capsules. Then, the researchers have to search out the place the capsules have landed.
Earlier than dropping two capsules carrying separate copies of the information, the SuperBIT workforce coordinated with the Argentine police, who Massey and Sirks say had been an important a part of the retrieval. The capsules landed in a distant space with tough terrain, and the researchers knew solely the approximate areas; Sirks had developed software program to calculate the touchdown website based mostly on climate circumstances, however sturdy crosswinds over the Andes and a defective battery meant they couldn’t monitor the touchdown craft exactly.
One of many data-recovery techniques was additionally “inspected by the native wildlife” upon its touchdown, Massey says. A cougar discovered the system and dragged it away from the preliminary website. Fortunately, the system wasn’t broken badly, and the information was protected.
SuperBIT’s flight earlier this yr, Hamilton says, was the primary time that the NASA Balloon Program had used one of these data-recovery system. Now, Hamilton says NASA is trying into different strategies of performing “knowledge drops,” by means of applications together with the FLOATing DRAGON Problem, a contest is looking for prototypes of comparable gadgets from college college students.
Sirks and Massey additionally plan to enhance their design for future telescopes by fixing the issue that they had with the system’s battery throughout its descent. And, to maintain the system protected from wildlife after touchdown, Massey has an thought:
“Subsequent time,” he says, ”I assume we’ll must put one thing that smells a bit dangerous onto it.”
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