SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Antarctica: perfect place for catching cosmic rays

The icy continent is home to an experiment to understand our galaxy.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
ST. LOUIS -- Some can't sleep when they arrive at the Ice, but Washington University engineer Paul Dowkontt admits he's fond of the 24-hour sunshine of Antarctica.
"In St. Louis in the winter, you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. Here, the sun shines all the time," he said by phone from McMurdo Station, the largest outpost on the snowy continent.
The foliage is imaginary and cross-country skiers are asked to follow a marked course -- lest they plunge into cracks in the ice. Fresh fruit is snatched up soon after delivery from Christchurch, New Zealand, 2,000 miles away. A storm can mean a wind chill of 100 degrees below zero.
But the roughly 1,200 scientists, adventure seekers and support staff who "summer" at McMurdo each November, December and January can enjoy temperatures in the balmy 30s. A penguin even will waddle near the road occasionally.
It's not the allure of endless sunny days that keeps Dowkontt coming back to McMurdo -- it's the ballooning. He and a handful of physicists from Washington University are living at McMurdo to monitor an astronomy experiment that is circling the continent counterclockwise, 20 miles above the icy surface at the cusp of space.
Seeking clues
In mid-December, the 450-foot-tall balloon and its boxy gondola were launched successfully. The experiment is designed to hunt cosmic rays, which offer one of the few clues scientists have to explore our galactic neighborhood.
Bob Binns, a Washington University physicist leading the team in Antarctica, described the experiment as a kind of "sample recovery" from distant worlds. "We'll never go to these stars," he said in a telephone call from the South Pole base. "These cosmic rays deliver the material right to our doors."
But, he acknowledges, "We have to go to Antarctica to get them."
Sharing the ride in space is a detector looking for tiny particles called neutrinos and a series of experiments designed by middle-school pupils.
The team plans to stay for the duration of the balloon's journey, which scientists hope will last as long as a month, allowing for two laps of the frigid continent.
Antarctica is ideal for catching cosmic rays for several reasons. The constant sun satiates the solar panels hanging below the 3,000-pound gondola. Balloons are launched easily and retrieved without crossing geographic borders.
Cosmic rays are charged atoms blasted here by exploding stars. Physicists don't even know the basic origin of the faint particles. Some believe the rays came from hot stars, emitted in what is called stellar wind. Others say the particles were part of cool dust or gases far from stars before they were sent on their galactic journey.
Researchers hope a trans-iron galactic element recorder will help clear up the debate.