Meanwhile, in Antarctica, the search for signatures of primordial gravitational waves in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background goes on. Here’s a fascinating blog by a member of the SPIDER team, whose balloon-borne experiment was recently launched and is currently circling the South Pole taking data. Here’s hoping it works out as planned!
This is surreal.
I have been working on SPIDER for three and a half years, and much of the rest of the collaboration has been working for many years beyond that. We have all gone through intense times of stress and disappointment, victories and defeats. The personal sacrifice on the part of every individual on the team to get SPIDER to the point of flight readiness has been a weight on all of our shoulders as we prepared to launch our hopes and dreams on a balloon.
Ballooning is incredibly risky. Everything can work flawlessly on the ground, and then one thing can break during launch, or freeze or overheat at float altitude, and no amount of commanding from afar can bring it back to life. This happens so often in ballooning, and all you can do is obsess over every aspect of the experiment, have redundancy where possible, and…
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In the Dark 