At Air's Outer Edge

Satellites have copped most of the headlines as observation posts outside the earth's atmosphere. But in many ways balloons are better. They are vastly cheaper; they can be manned and recovered; and modern balloons made out of thin plastic film can lift heavy and bulky instruments above nearly all of the atmosphere.

The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation are the principal sponsors of this sort of space research. For weeks two Navy scientists have been standing by in South Dakota, waiting for a break in the weather to soar aloft in a "Strato-lab" balloon carrying a 16-in. Schmidt telescope. Target of the flight will be Mars, now unusually close to the earth. When Mars is photographed by surface telescopes, the fine detail on its surface is blurred by turbulence in the atmosphere. There should be little or no turbulence above the 16-mile (80,000-ft.) level to which the Strato-lab will carry its telescope; photographs taken with it should give a better view of the mysterious surface of Mars.

Traces from Space. A longer-range project is a monster balloon 400 ft. high that will rise some time next summer from the deck of an aircraft carrier and soar to a height of 23 miles (120,000 ft.). Below it will dangle an aluminum cylinder containing 600 specially designed photographic plates in a stack 2 ft. high and 21 in. wide. The balloon is expected to stay up for 48 hours. When it descends, a swarm of airplanes and ships will track it and rescue the cylinder.

The brainchild of the University of Chicage's Dr. Marcel Schein and financed by the National Science Foundation, the balloon rig is designed to catch cosmic ray particles while they are still streaking in from distant space at interstellar speed, unhampered by dense air. Even those that are single protons can carry far more energy than the most powerful particles generated in earthbound laboratories. Striking into Dr. Schein's plates, they will leave traces of their passing in the form of lacy tracks that physicists can decipher to provide new clues to some of the most baffling mysteries of physics.

Speeding Disks. It is known, for instance, that when two protons collide at low speed, each transfers all its energy to the other. But when particles collide at very high speed, the energy transfer may be as low as 10%. One explanation of this behavior is based on the relativistic principle that objects moving at extremely high speed become foreshortened in the direction of their motion. Particles that are essentially spheres at low speed are thought to turn into thin disks as they closely approach the speed of light. When two of these speeding disks collide broadside on, they pass through each other in so short a time that they cannot exchange much energy. Dr. Schein's balloon-borne plates may confirm or demolish this theory.

Dr. Schein also hopes for evidence that antimatter, recently created in man's laboratories, exists in nature. Antimatter is annihilated instantly when it hits ordinary matter. But antimatter particles arriving from space may penetrate the earth's thin outer atmosphere to the 120,000-ft. level without suffering fatal collisions. If one of them hits the photographic plates, it should make a tremendous splash.

If there is antimatter in the universe, says Dr. Schein, there may be anti-gravity too. Antiprotons should rise upward, instead of falling toward the earth. The great balloon experiment may find evidence of such offbeat behavior. The tracks may even show that the elementary particles (protons, neutrons, etc.) are not really elementary. Each may contain a complicated structure whose behavior turns out more strange than anything yet imagined.

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