Engineers at Pennsylvania State University needed a data storage unit for their experiment with an unmanned balloon. The project is sponsored by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
They found a solution with a solid state E-Disk flash drive from BiTMICRO Networks Inc., Fremont, Calif.
Penn State designers used the drive on their Cosmic Rays Energetics And Mass (CREAM) project, a high-altitude balloon experiment that investigated the composition of ultra high-energy cosmic rays with NASA’s Long Duration Balloon (LDB) vehicle technology.
The project is led by researchers at the University of Maryland in collaboration with the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Chicago, and other universities and organizations in Italy, Korea, France and Mexico.
They launched the balloon from the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station, Antarctica on Dec. 16, 2004. It traveled 41 days and 22 hours, breaking the previous unmanned balloon flight record of 31 days and 20 hours. Throughout the flight, CREAM instruments recorded about 36 gigabytes of heavy nuclei data onto a 43-gigabyte E-Disk flash disk drive. For more information, see www.bitmicro.com.
