Category: Danny Ball

NASA Balloon Makes Record-Breaking Flight

January 29, 2005

Flying near the edge of space, a NASA scientific balloon broke the flight record for duration and distance. It soared for nearly 42 days, making three orbits around the South Pole. The record-breaking balloon, almost as large as one and one half football fields, carried the Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) experiment. CREAM is designed to explore the supernova acceleration limit of cosmic rays, the relativistic gas of protons, electrons and heavy nuclei arriving at Earth from outside the solar system.