American cosmologists at the South Pole marked the New Year with the launch of a balloon equipped with six telescopes focused on verifying the Big Bang, The New York Times reports.

The experiment, named the Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust and the Epoch of Reionization, or shortly SPIDER, was designed by Princeton and Caltech physicists to search for primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These waves are traces of the early Universe and are proposed by contemporary cosmogony theories.

The faint curlicues in the polarization of the microwaves "would have been caused by violent disruptions of space-time when the Universe as we know it began expanding," The New York Times explains. So SPIDER will try to detect such signals, thus giving validation to the theory of inflation. Moreover, measuring the characteristics of detected signals will make the theory more precise.

According to the Caltech Observational Cosmology website, SPIDER will also "measure the weak gravitational lensing of the CMB polarization due to the matter distribution along the line of sight."

From a technical point of view, SPIDER is a balloon carrying a cryostat gondola with six single-frequency telescopes that "provide a large field of view and allow for a nearly optimal modulation scheme." SPIDER will travel above Antarctica for 25 days.

Similar research has been conducted with BICEP, an experiment that allegedly confirmed inflation after observing microwaves in a single wavelength. However, follow-up research casted doubt onto the results, as it suggested the signal could have been caused by interstellar dust, The New York Times reports.

In contrast with the BICEP project, SPIDER will trace microwaves in two wavelengths and will hover above the atmosphere, which frees it from mistakenly registering space dust.

According to the prevailing Big Bang theory, the Universe has been expanding since the moment it was contained in a single tiny point approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

earlier report NASA Balloons Begin Flying in Antarctica for 2014 Campaign
NASA's 2014-2015 Antarctic Scientific Balloon Campaign took to the skies Wednesday, Dec. 17, with the successful launch of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA-III) from the Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility outside of McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

The NASA zero-pressure balloon lifted the 4,601-pound ANITA-III payload to an operational float altitude of 123,000 feet, or more than 23 miles above the Earth's surface.

"This was an excellent launch in light wind conditions," said Hugo Franco, campaign manager from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility. "The balloon performed normally during ascent, and entry into float. Science reports all systems are working properly and have begun calibrations via LOS [line of sight]."

Poor weather conditions scrubbed earlier launch attempts. Now that ANITA-III is airborne, scientists will use its instruments to detect the ultra-high energy cosmogenic neutrino flux, which originates as a result of the integrated ultra-high energy cosmic ray interactions throughout the universe.

"I'm very proud of the crew on-ice for this launch," said Debbie Fairbrother, Chief, NASA's Balloon Program Office. "ANITA-III is a very large payload, and the team made the launch operations look easy!"

Dr. Peter Gorham, University of Hawaii at Manoa, is the principal investigator for ANITA-III. A much smaller balloon was launched several hours later as a mission of opportunity with the ANITA High Altitude Calibration (ANITA HiCAL) payload. Dr. David Besson, University of Kansas, is the principal investigator for ANITA HiCAL.

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) payload. COSI, a gamma-ray telescope designed to study astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission with high spectral and spatial resolution, is flight ready and the next large payload to be launched from Antarctica. Dr. Steven Boggs, University of California, Berkeley, is the principal investigator.

COSI will fly on an 18.8 million-cubic-foot NASA Super Pressure Balloon (SBP), the largest flight of a SPB from Antarctica. Most scientific balloons experience altitude variances based on temperature changes of the balloon lifting gas between day and night. Super Pressure Balloons are the latest in balloon technology, enabling ultra-long duration missions on the order of 100 days or more at constant float altitudes due to the pressurization of the balloon.

"Super pressure balloons are going to be a real game-changer for conducting scientific investigations in the near-space environment," said Fairbrother.

The third flight planned for the 2014-2015 Antarctic Campaign is the Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation Dust and the Epoch of Reionization (SPIDER). SPIDER is a balloon-borne sub-millimeter polarimeter using large format arrays of cryogenic bolometric detectors to produce high-fidelity images of the southern sky. Dr. William Jones, Princeton University, is the principal investigator. The SPIDER team is finishing preparations to become flight ready.

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility manages the agency's scientific Balloon Program with 10 to 15 flights each year from launch sites worldwide. The balloons are massive in volume; the average-sized balloon could hold the volume of nearly 200 blimps. Previous work on balloons have contributed to confirming the Big Bang Theory. In addition, balloons have been used to test new technologies, such as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, which will enable NASA to land larger, heavier payloads on Mars.

Aadditional Source: Sputnik News