University Calendar
The Ups and Downs of Scientific Ballooning
Dr. Erika Hamden, Assistant Professor, University of Arizona, and TED Fellow, will be visiting to speak about her research.
About the Seminar
You may think that scientific ballooning combines the gentle joy of a hot air balloon ride with the excitement of discovery and adventure. While the last 60+ years of scientific balloon flights operated by NASA have discovered a great many things, the process of getting a telescope off the ground and into the stratosphere is anything but gentle, fraught with challenges, heartbreak, and exhilaration. I will discuss my own experiences as the manager of the Faint Intergalactic medium Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2), a UV multi-object spectrograph which flew on September 22nd, 2018 from Fort Sumner, NM. I will describe the telescope, instrument, and flight of FIREBall-2. I will also describe the science goals of FIREBall-2, which is focused on observing the gas in the circum-galactic and circum-quasar media of z=0.7 galaxies via Ly-alpha and other tracers.