On December 9, 2012, a balloon the size of a football field ascended nearly 140,000 feet into the Antarctic sky. The balloon carried Super-TIGER, a two-ton instrument built to detect cosmic rays. W. Robert Binns and Martin Israel, who head the cosmic ray group within the physics department at Washington University in St. Louis, describe this record-breaking experiment and explain why they seek to know more about the origins of cosmic rays.
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Image: Richard Bose, an electronics engineer from Washington University in St. Louis, and a graduate student observe the Super-TIGER launch in Antarctica. Photo by Ryan Murphy.
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