For CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass)

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Launch site:Williams Field, McMurdo Base, Antarctica  
Launch team: National Scientific Balloon Facility (NSBF)
Balloon: Open balloon (zero pressure)
Volume: Raven - 39.000.000 cuft - (0.8 Mil)
Serial number: W 39.47-2-44
Flight identification number: 552N
Campaign: - 
Payload weight: 4476 lbs
Gondola weight: -
Overall weight: 5676 lbs

The balloon was launched at 16:12 utc on December 15th 2005, by dynamic method using launch vehicle.

Following a nominal ascent phase, the balloonn leveled at float height and started to travel in a anticlockwise trajectory.

The flight developed without incidents and completed near two full circles to the Antarctic continent.

The balloon was terminated from an LC-130 plane using Line Of Sight commands at 1:22 utc on January 13th, 2006 after 28 days, 9 hours and 52 minutes of travel. The payload landed at 74-22.1 South / 157-40.1 East (249 miles northwest of McMurdo Station, Antarctica). After touch ground, during parachute separation, the payload tipped over but did not drag.  

CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass)

Responsable institution:  University of Maryland / NASA Wallops Flight Facility
Principal Investigator:  Eun Suk Seo / David Pierce

An instrument built to explore the supernova acceleration limit of cosmic rays, the relativistic gas of protons, electrons and heavy nuclei arriving at Earth from outside the solar system.

The instrument consists of a sampling tungsten/scintillating-fiber calorimeter preceded by a graphite target with scintillating-fiber layers for trigger and track-reconstruction purposes, a transition radiation detector (TRD) for observing heavy nuclei, and a segmented timing-based particle-charge detector.

A key feature of the instrument is its ability to obtain simultaneous measurements of the energy and charge of a subset of nuclei by the complementary calorimeter and TRD techniques, thereby allowing in-flight inter-calibration of their energy scales. See details of the first one.