Development of instruments for space exploration using meteorological balloons

Abstract

Indian Centre for Space Physics is engaged in studying terrestrial and extra-terrestrial high energy phenomena from meteorological balloon borne platforms. A complete payload system with such balloons is at the most about five kilograms of weight. One has to adopt innovative and optimal design for various components of the experiment, so that the data can be procured at decent heights of ∼ 35 − 42 km and at the same time, some scientific goals are achieved. In this paper, we mainly describe the instruments in detail and present their test and calibration results. We discuss, how we implemented and tested three major instruments, namely, a Geiger-Müller counter, a single crystal scintillator detector and a phoswich type scintillator detector for our missions. We also present some flight data of a few missions to demonstrate the capability of such experiments.

Detection of Crab radiation with a meteorological balloon borne phoswich detector

“…In the scope of this current work we will only consider the data from G1. More details of the detector configuration, operation and readout system is described in Bhowmick et al (2018).…”

“…The details of the laboratory tests done on the detector to study the effect of diverse atmospheric conditions such as temperature, pressure etc. are described in Chakrabarti et al (2017); Bhowmick et al (2018) and C1117.…”

“…The detector and the electronic readout system are powered from battery provided in the payload. The signal amplification system is achieved by two More details of the detector configuration, operation and readout system is described in Bhowmick et al (2018).…”

Study of Secondary Cosmic Rays and Astronomical X-Ray Sources using Small Stratospheric Balloons

“…The calibration and energy resolution of the detector before every mission indicate that all instruments are working as expected, and we received high-quality data. The details about the data quality and the extraction process were written and explained in Bhowmick et al (2019). Using our balloon data, we already showed the CRs to be anticorrelated with solar activity (Sarkar et al 2017;Sikdar et al 2023a) during solar cycle 24 and source detection method and timing properties of Crab pulsar (Sikdar et al 2023c), and we measured the spectrum of solar flares and a gamma-ray burst (Chakrabarti et al 2014;Sikdar et al 2023b).…”

“…For payload attitude measurement purposes, we use the 9DOF data, which contain a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis magnetometer, and a 3-axis gyroscope. Details of the instrument readout process, device operations, data storage, and their purposes are explained in detail in Chakrabarti et al (2017), Bhowmick et al (2019). Other ancillary equipment is the GPS/GSM tracker to give the positions of the payload, the atmospheric pressure and temperature sensors, one or more video cameras for viewing the horizon, the balloon, and the Earth's surface, etc.…”