For William Jones and Anne Gambrel, the best views of the universe are from about 20 miles (32 kilometers) above the ice fields of Antarctica. From that special vantage point, balloon-borne telescopes can gaze at a faint cosmic glow — the remnants of the first light emitted from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago.
Named SPIDER (Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust, and the Epoch of Reionization), the telescopes are designed to answer some of the most enduring questions about how quickly the cosmos expanded into existence. Data collected from SPIDER may also help researchers explain other curious aspects of the universe — such as its nearly uniform temperature and its exceptional flatness — which cannot be accounted for by the Big Bang theory alone.
For the past decade though, the research team, led by Jones, an associate professor of physics at Princeton University, has been dogged by more earthly matters: a government shutdown, uncooperative weather, and now, a global pandemic — all of which have cancelled launches. Since receiving funding in 2010, SPIDER has completed just one of two planned flights.
The delays have not only slowed scientific progress, but also the careers of the research team. Many of the scientists, like Gambrel — who had worked with Jones at Princeton before becoming a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago in 2018 — have had to push back their dissertations or alter their research due to setbacks.
And SPIDER’s story mirrors the struggles of the cosmologists. The telescopes must brave harsh weather to collect painstakingly precise measurements. “Delays, challenges, and mishaps of one kind or another abound,” John Kovac, an astronomer at Harvard University who is leading a separate group of research missions to Antarctica, tells
Astronomy. “[Gathering data] is a long-term investment and effort.”
But both SPIDER and scientists press on. That’s because experiments like this are one of the few ways to observe the extreme conditions of the early universe, where temperatures were a trillion times hotter than anything created in human-made experiments. And at those temperatures, our understanding of physics basically breaks down.
The laws of nature that we can study here on Earth are limited to what’s accessible to us, Jones explains. “And yet, who’s to say what laws of nature apply on much grander scales? And if you want to poke at that, you need to use the universe as a laboratory.”
A cosmological Hail Mary
Preparing SPIDER for flight — a multi-month, labyrinthine process that requires skill, intricate logistics, and some blind luck — is, according to Jones, the research equivalent of a Hail Mary pass in the last seconds of an American football game.
In order to launch SPIDER from McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s largest research facility, researchers must negotiate the whims of weather patterns in both the stratosphere 20 miles (32 km) above Earth and closer to the ground. Possible deployment dates are restricted to the winter months, when the polar vortex — a pattern of stratospheric winds — is strong enough to guide SPIDER’s flight in a predictable counterclockwise path around the continent. But scientists must also contend with weather immediately above McMurdo Station, as they require a 12-hour period of calm winds and clear skies to launch a balloon. Jones estimates there are about five such days per year, with some years going by without a single opportunity.
“The stakes are incredibly high,” he says, “if anything goes wrong, you could well sink your project for everyone on your team for a year.”