Editor:- May 20, 2008 - Mtron announced today
that a terabyte of their SSD storage will be used in a NASA funded project
(flying over the South Pole) to research high-energy cosmic rays.
Neutrino events are rare and hard to detect on Earth. But the
Antarctic ice sheet provides a large nature-made detector with a million square
kilometer "lens" (when viewed from the balloon's 35km mission
height).
ANITA
is a radio telescope attached to NASA's stratospheric balloon to detect
Cherenkov pulses created when neutrinos from space hit the ice sheet which
is "remarkably transparent to radio waves."
ANITA's 2nd
month long experiment will start in December and will include 8x 3.5"
SATA SSDs from Mtron making up the data logging storage.
Editor's comments:- balloons are a rugged environment for
data storage, because apart from the expected extremes of altitude and
temperature - the way these flights finish is often with a crash. So the ability
to survive impact shocks is also importanct.
Previously mentioned
SSD balloon flights on these pages include:-
- an SSD from Memtech
plunged 127,000 feet as part of a NASA weather balloon that crashed onto a
Virginia highway, where it was promptly run over by a truck. Despite being "totally
bent out of shape" the data was still accessible.
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