Jan 23 2015
After spending 16 days suspended from a giant helium balloon floating 115,000 feet (35,000 meters) above Antarctica, a scientific instrument dubbed SPIDER has landed in a remote region of the frozen continent.
Prior to launch, the team laid out the parachute and hang lines in front of SPIDER, seen in the distance. The long-duration balloon that would carry SPIDER into the sky is attached to the end of the parachute shown here in the foreground. Credit: Jeff Filippini
Conceived of and built by an international team of scientists, the instrument was launched from McMurdo Station on New Year's Day. The California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, California, designed, fabricated and tested the six refracting telescopes the instrument uses to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the thermal afterglow of the Big Bang that created our universe.
SPIDER's goal: to search the CMB for the signal of inflation, an explosive event that blew our observable universe up from a volume smaller than a single atom in the first "fraction of an instant" after its birth.
The instrument appears to have performed well during its flight, said Jamie Bock, head of the SPIDER receiver team at Caltech and JPL. "Of course, we won't know everything until we get the full data back as part of the instrument recovery."
Source: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/