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Balloon Array for Relativistic Radiation Belt Electron Loss (BARREL)

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Although the BARREL mission launched only balloons during the years of 2013 - 2016, research using data collected on these flights is ongoing, so stay tuned for updates! 

BARREL was a mission of opportunity under NASA's Van Allen Probes mission. We've now completed two successful campaigns where a total of 40 payloads were launched from Antarctica setting up a slowly moving array able to study the spatial and temporal variations of  electron precipitation from the radiation belts. We launched from two stations in Antarctica, the British base Halley Bay and the South African station SANAE IV. We also launched 6 payloads (one twice for a total of 7 launches) from Kiruna Sweden in August 2015 and then launched them again for a total of 8 balloon flights during the August of 2016 from Kiruna Sweden. During the third and fourth campaigns we had coordinated data collection with EISCAT, the Van Allen Probes, and other ground based and space based instruments. By the end of the campaigns, there were over 90 researchers coordinating on a daily basis with the BARREL team working on 7 different satellite missions, 1 other balloon mission, and way too many ground based instruments to count. We thank everyone involved for making this an amazing tour de force of data collection. This was a very exciting campaign, read about it at NASA here .  

You can keep up with the BARREL campaign on our blog or via Twitter. 
List of publications and presentations associated with the BARREL project: