NASA is preparing its ComPair science instrument for a scheduled launch aboard a high-altitude balloon from Fort Sumner, New Mexico to test new technologies for measuring and studying gamma rays.
ComPair is designed to detect gamma-ray emissions with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts, an energy range that current missions have not covered, NASA said Tuesday.
The payload needs to reach above the majority of the Earth’s atmosphere up to 130,000 ft to ensure technical readiness of new gamma-ray technologies.
“Gamma rays are too high-energy for a traditional telescope to detect – the light flies right between the mirror’s atoms,” according to Regina Caputo, ComPair project manager at Goddard Space Flight Center.
“Instead, our instrument uses layers of different kinds of elements and compounds stacked on top of each other. As gamma rays pass through the instrument, they interact with different layers depending on their energies,” Caputo said.
ComPair has four major components: a tracker containing 10 layers of silicon detectors; a high-resolution calorimeter made of cadmium, zinc and telluride; a high-energy calorimeter made of cesium iodide; and an anticoincidence detector.
The instrument was developed in collaboration with Goddard, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory.
NASA’s 2023 fall scientific balloon campaign window opens Aug. 10.
