ATIC 4 in Antarctica

ATIC Terminated at 1/15/07 00:30:31Z

To get up-to-date info on on ATIC's 4th flight over the Antarctic please click here

Dec 4, 2007:  Trip to Cape Evans.

   Oct. 26, 2007 18:00 CDT: The ATIC crew arrived on the ice on October 23, 2007.  The experiment has been put into its lower external frame awaiting some final testing.  See the Status and Picture pages.

Check out the New 360 Degree Panoramic Shots of Willy Field.

Watch the launch from the CSBF website

See the ATIC webcam view of Payload 1

See Status for current news

See Multimedia page for current images and videos

   The ATIC balloon flight program will concentrate on measuring the cosmic ray proton and helium spectra from below 5 x 10¹⁰ eV to more than 10¹⁴ eV, with statistical accuracy better than 30% at the highest energy. This unique coverage, more than three decades in energy with a single instrument, will enable us to investigate the spectral difference between hydrogen and helium, and identify any spectral breaks over a broad energy range. In addition, ATIC will fill an existing gap in measurements of the proton/alpha ratio between observations below 100 GeV and the highest emulsion chamber energies. Concurrently, ATIC will measure the spectra of nuclei up to iron, with individual element resolution and superior energy resolution.  

See Science for more on the experiment objectives

  To achieve these scientific objectives ATIC will need a series of Long Duration Balloon (LDB) flights.  During these flights a large volume (10's of millions of cubic feet) Helium filled balloon will carry the ATIC experiment to the very edge of space (about 120,000 feet) for a period of time lasting from 10 to 15 days.   The first of these flights will take place during December, 2000 when the ATIC balloon payload is launched from McMurdo, Antarctica

See Instrument for more on how the experiment works

   The ATIC Classroom includes age appropriate lessons for middle and high school students which make use of data returned from the ATIC instrument during its LDB flight.  In addition, video reports from the 2000-2001 flight provide students with an idea of what we will be doing "on the ice" this year as well as how scientists live and work in Antarctica.

Track LDB experiments during their flight