Researchers push scientific boundaries daily, and for a University research team, high-energy astrophysics is the next frontier.
John P. Wefel, physics professor and Louisiana Space Consortium director, along with physics professors Gregory Guzik and Michael Cherry and physics doctoral candidate Nick Cannady, comprise the University’s team in the United States’ division of the International CALorimetric Electron Telescope project, developed as part of the International Space Station utilization.
The CALET project, led by Japanese researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, also has research teams at the Washington University in St. Louis, the Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Denver and in Italy.
Scientists believe cosmic rays are formed when stars blow up in what is known as a supernova explosion, Wefel said.
Wefel said the supernova remnants work as natural particle accelerators pushing elements of the periodic table through space, often hitting Earth’s atmosphere.
“We are bombarded constantly by very high-energy particles that come from outside our solar system — those are called cosmic rays,” Wefel said. “What we’re trying to do is answer some age-old questions that people have been wondering about. One of these is ‘Where do these cosmic rays come from?’ Because we know they have been around for at least 4 billion years, we can go back to old meteorites and find traces of them. They’re part of our environment and have been for a very long time.”
With the CALET instrument, scientists will capture the cosmic rays, separate the particles and study their composition at higher energy levels to test astrophysics theories.
“[The CALET instrument] is pushing us into a new energy regime for these observations and helping to uncover and verify our understanding of fundamental physics,” Cannady said.
Scientists in Japan built the instrument itself, while the U.S. team advised and helped develop the instrument’s software, tested the software before launch by running simulations and algorithm programs and will contribute with analyzing and processing data collected in space once the instrument is launched.
The University will house what Wefel calls the U.S. CALET data center, a 120-node computer system storing data collected from the instrument, which is delivered to the U.S. by the Japanese research team, for processing and analysis done by all teams in the American division.
“This instrument will give us much better data at much higher energies that any of the current instruments that ever have recorded this type of data,” Wefel said. “The whole idea of CALET is to push measurements of electrons, in particular, protons and [elements] to higher energies than we’ve seen before to see if there is something new. Why is that interesting? It will be in this high energy region that we’re going to be able to see where these rays came from.”
Wefel said CALET is expected to launch from Japan late summer or early fall 2015 to the International Space Station.
The team hopes the instrument will collect data for five years.

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Ronni Bourgeois

LSU physics Ph.D candidate Nick Cannady researches in the lab on March 10, 2014, for an international project to develop an instrument which will study cosmic rays in space.