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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 23, 2009 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

photo of balloon team in Antarctica

Eun-Suk Seo

"A Balloon’s Eye View of the Universe"

ABSTRACT -- Ballooning offers cutting-edge science discoveries with state-of-the-art instruments in a near-space environment. Driven mainly by science, the investigations also play important roles in training experimental space scientists and engineers, and in developing new instruments for future space missions. The Antarctic balloon program has been spectacularly successful with flight durations of up to 42 days. Three science payloads have been flown simultaneously during the last two seasons. The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC), the Balloon borne Experiment with a Superconducting Spectrometer (BESS), and the Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) investigations were flown during the 2007 – 2008 season. These payloads were configured with particle detectors to study cosmic-ray origin, acceleration and propagation. They were used to search for exotic sources, such as dark matter and antimatter, and to explore a possible limit to particle acceleration in supernovas. I will review their results and discuss some challenges to mission implementation.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Eun-Suk Seo is an Associate Professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Physics and Institute for Physical Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. in 1991 from Louisiana State University, including two years as a visiting graduate student at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She and her group employ satellite and balloon-borne instruments to make direct measurements of cosmic rays. Her research projects focus on searches for exotic matter, such as antimatter and dark matter, and direct measurements of galactic cosmic rays to understand their origin, acceleration, and propagation. She has worked on numerous projects for the detection and characterization of cosmic rays, including four major international collaborations: ATIC (the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter), AMS (the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer for the International Space Station), BESS (the Balloon-borne Experiment with a Superconducting magnet Spectrometer), and CREAM (the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass investigation, which she leads). She received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 1997; a NASA Group Achievement Award, 2006; and an Antarctica Service Medal, 2008. She was a member of the NASA Astrophysics Working Group, 1997-1998; NASA-Korea Investigators Consultative Group 1997-2002; the ACCESS Investigators Working Group, 1998-2001; the NASA Astronomy and Physics Working Group, 2002-2004; and the NASA Scientific Ballooning Roadmap Team (2004-present).


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov