SPIDER experiment touches down in Antarctica
Thursday, January 22, 2015 - 09:40
in Astronomy & Space
After spending 16 days suspended from a giant helium balloon floating 115,000 feet above Antarctica, a scientific instrument dubbed SPIDER has landed in a remote region of the frozen continent. Conceived of and built by an international team of scientists, the instrument launched from McMurdo Station on New Year's Day. Caltech and JPL designed, fabricated, and tested the six refracting telescopes the instrument uses to map the thermal afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB). SPIDER's goal: to search the CMB for the signal of inflation, an explosive event that blew our observable universe up from a volume smaller than a single atom in the first fraction of an instant after its birth.