After a decade of research and planning, LSU researchers and their international partners, who are on the hunt for game-changing high-energy electron particles, sent their telescope into space.
This research once again puts LSU at the forefront of exploring the cosmos.
The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) reached the International Space Station last week and will soon begin its five-year mission.
That is, after it’s powered up.
“It’ll take about three months until the experiment is fully turned on,” said Michael Cherry, a physics professor and one of LSU’s lead staff members on the project. “There is a lengthy, detailed, step-by-step procedure for turning the instrument on.”
After the 90-day gear-up, the telescope will start sending data to researchers on Earth.
The telescope’s rendezvous with the ISS can be viewed online at NASA TV.
The project is a collaboration between researchers in the U.S., Italy and Japan and will attempt to replicate the findings of a 2008 study.
The study’s experiment, performed by LSU physics professors John Wefel and Gregory Guzik, who are also on the CALET mission, used a series of high-altitude balloon flights launched from Antarctica to search for electrons.
The high-energy particles indicate one of two things, Cherry said: a nearby source of high-energy radiation or an indication of dark matter.
While dark matter — an elusive substance which emits neither light nor energy and has ever been observed directly — may seem like the more glamorous option, Cherry said he and his researchers are excited about whatever information they can tease out of space.
“[CALET] is designed to look at very high-energy cosmic rays to try to understand their sources and how they are accelerated to their very highest energies,” Cherry said. “Either way, it’ll be interesting.”
The previous experiment found a much higher number of high-energy particles than were expected, which Cherry said defied previous findings. Scientists hope CALET’s multi-year exposure to space will confirm the results of the 2008 experiment.
The LSU team consists of several staff members, post doctoral students, graduates and undergraduates, Cherry said.
The LSU researchers, who make up some of the approximately 50 scientists who worked on CALET, breathed a collective sigh of relief once their project safely reached the ISS, Cherry said. But their work is far from over.
Once data comes back, LSU will become the U.S. CALET Data Center, leading the nation’s researchers, including representatives at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Denver, in receiving and disseminating information.
“The big focus is on the cosmic ray electrons where one wants to confirm that earlier balloon result, and other experiments that have shown there are more electrons than expected,” Cherry said.

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Photo courtesy of the LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy