Anita

Wow, I didn't realize I was getting behind in my blogs!

So there's this balloon called Anita. I forget what it stands for but its huge. The weather people at McMurdo released Anita on Friday or Saturday and somehow it got off course. It's suppose to be released and circumvent the earth...but something went wrong and it started flying south towards us. So 2 days later, we can see it with our own eyes.

The size is 40,000 square feet - it's so big the this new South Pole station can fit inside it. Anyway, it was 30 miles up in the air when I saw it with my own eyes... then there were a bunch of people looking at it through a telescope so of course, I took some pics.

What Anita does is look for neutrinos (see Dec 7th blog for neutrino info). It detects radio waves in the earth's crust and finds these neutrinos so the drill team can triangulate the mass of neutrinos, drill holes in the earths crust and insert doms to find out where in space the neutrinos come from...

The telescope inverts is so anita is seen upside-down although the balloon portion really is on top. You can see the wire which is suppose to be red and the little box it is carrying. The box is what detects the radio waves/ neutrinos.