Floating above the Earth’s atmosphere — 120,000 feet above ground — the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, or BLAST, takes measurements of the stars and our universe.
It now resides in the newly-completed High Bay BLAST laboratory located at 31st and Walnut streets.
The High Bay BLAST lab was completed in early January as a space where scientists can build large instruments. “This is something I’ve needed for the past 10 years,” said Physics and Astronomy professor Mark Devlin, who leads the project.
Since BLAST must be serviced in a large space, “there’s only so much they were able to do here [before],” said Sara King, project manager for the School of Arts and Sciences. “There was a need for it.”
Devlin works with physicists from around the world to analyze the data that BLAST gathers about the universe.
It consists of the telescope and an aluminum “gondola” frame that holds the instrument in place. The telescope is then attached to a balloon which is inflated to 37 million cubic feet.
Sending up telescopes into the atmosphere was actually a very common practice in the 1960s as an alternative to satellites, though the popularity of this practice has declined since.
“It started as a military thing after World War II,” Devlin said. “Ballooning was common … there were about 60 to 70 flights a year.”
However, the flights during the 1960s were generally very short, Devlin said. Telescopes only went up for a few hours at a time and as a result, couldn’t gather a lot of data.
BLAST differs from its predecessors in that it can stay above the atmosphere for nearly a week and a half at a time.
The High Bay BLAST building at Penn features a cutting edge design. The building, for example, is insulated with radiant heating technology. “There are coills of liquid that [are] heated to 180 degrees in the ground,” King said. The building also features large remote-controlled windows with smaller independent windows that open easily, to allow scientists to test the telescope.
King described the facility as a large metal skeleton with panels surrounding it. The design provides a versatility that allows others to use the space as well.
Although Devlin has been petitioning for the BLAST lab for years, “they didn’t build it just for me,” he said.
King added that Penn has “several researchers who do this type of work [on] large scale instruments that need to be built while suspended.”
BLAST’s next scheduled flight is in December and it will be sent off from McMurdo station in Antartica, Devlin said. In the mean time, Devlin and his team of graduate students are working on fixing BLAST. It’s currently missing a gondola, which will help keep everything together.
BLAST’s journey will last 12 days. It will gather information about stars and how they are formed.
“I like building things,” said Elio Angile, a doctoral student working on this project. “The idea of something I helped build that goes up 120,000 feet and flying it from Antartica — it’s pretty amazing.”
