About This Project

STRATOSPOLCA (STRATOSpheric POLarimetry with Cadmium Telluride Array) is a student team from Portugal participating in the BEXUS programme. The BEXUS programme allows university students to fly scientific and technological experiments on research rballoons.

Our experiment will measure the background noise-level of gamma-ray as a function of the altitude and the multiplicity of the events, so that future experiments and simulations can benefit from this data to improve their statistics.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

High-energy polarimetry provides a deep understanding of the physical processes, geometry and magnetic fields of sources such as neutron stars, pulsars or black holes. So far, only a few and limited high-energy polarimetric measurements with workable data have been executed, being the most trustworthy measurements obtained recently by polarimeter POLAR.

With STRATOSPOLCA we aim at improving the knowledge of background radiation in altitude so that future detectors can be tested and, by knowing this background values, you can improve the signal to noise ratio.

What is the significance of this project?

When an experiment wants to study a celestial body, detecting the radiation of this body also detects the radiation from everything else. Knowing this background radiation we can filter it and study only the body of our interest.

Our experiment will measure the background noise-level of gamma-ray as a function of the altitude and the multiplicity of the events, so that future experiments and simulations can benefit from this data to improve their statistics.

The experiment will fly in a stratospheric balloon from the BEXUS programme.

What are the goals of the project?

We'll use a gamma ray detector that will fly on a stratospheric balloon. Our main goals is to measure the level of single, double and multiple events, drawing a profile of such events as a function of the altitude. We will also measure the energy of the interactions.

Pre-flight simulations will be programmed in order to acknowledge what data we expect to obtain and to calibrate the instrumentation.

We'll also test our isolation with a inexpensive alternative to the ones commonly used, and if it proves successful it will be an innovation in the area.