by Barry Tanenbaum

I’m on the phone with Joel Berlinghieri, physics department head, and Erik Rooman, lab manager, at The Citadel in South Carolina, and Joel’s saying, “In the first balloon launch the idea was to take a digital camera and fly it to see if we could get a gross cross section of cosmic rays....”

“Wait…what?” I say. “You were using a COOLPIX P6000 as a cosmic ray catcher?”

“Yes,” he says, “two of them. I’d done some work on using CCD detectors to record information, and it came to me that the CCD, the actual chip itself, could be used to record cosmic rays. It would energize some of the cells as a ray would go through, and the chip would strip off electrons and they would be deposited in each of the CCD wells as long as you could keep the frame dark—the aperture closed down. And if you were able to sweep the data off the chip periodically, you would have a record of the cosmic rays that passed through the CCD. And if we put two CCDs in the right configuration, with a small amount of attenuator, we could determine the amount of cosmic rays as a function of altitude, and if we got the geometry right, we would even be able to determine the orientation of the rays as they go through.”

“Of course,” I say.

They’d chosen the 13.5-megapixel P6000 because its intervalometer would allow them to program the camera to shoot at intervals and its GPS capability would record latitude and longitude for each photo, and by coordinating the balloon’s telemetry, they would be able to figure out the altitude.

And so, two P6000s were along on a high altitude research flight in which The Citadel’s pod flew with several others as part of a NASA grant program administered through the state of South Carolina.

“And everything worked out?” I say.

“Well,” Joel says, “we did have some difficulty retrieving the package.”

“The balloon hit the jet stream, stayed in it a little too long and landed in Ft. Bragg in North Carolina,” Erik says. “Unfortunately in the live-fire area of the special ops training ground.”

“Live fire?” I say.

“The Fort Bragg folks were really upset,” Erik says. “Joel and I were on the chase team, and I’m former military and still have a clearance, and I was able to make some calls. They grudgingly let us in, but because of the live fire we had to be escorted. A very nice range officer took us in and we found the package that night, around midnight, in a swamp area. There were tanks going around and humvees…it was a hoot. But we got it back.” One of the cameras was undamaged; the other, sadly, had made its one and only flight.

The surviving P6000 made the pictures you see here during a second flight in which the pod broke loose when the balloon hit massive turbulence. “The package fell from about 12 miles up, without a parachute,” Erik says, “and was recovered from someone’s yard when they saw our ‘If found, please return to…’ label.”

“Wait…what?” I say.

“That’s one tough camera,” Joel says.