The balloon took off from Wyoming, but high winds carried the ascending balloon and plummeting device all the way to Nebraska, UNC professor Charles Keuhn said.
"Normally each school would send people along on the recovery team," he said. "But due to eclipse traffic it was decided just to use a very small team this time."
A small launch team ended up recovering UNC's muon detector.
"We'll pick up the detector from the recovery team later this week and start looking at the data," he said. "Hopefully, we'll have a very quick and dirty plot of the muon count within a week or two, but deeper analysis will take a while."
Three UNC seniors, John Ringler, Josh Fender and Justin Morse, spent thousands of hours during the last year and a half designing the muon detector so they might learn more about the universe.
A muon is a lot like an electron, according to Ringler and Fender.
Scientific theory says most muons are extrasolar, meaning they come to Earth from outside the solar system and not from the sun. The eclipse offered a good opportunity to study that theory by launching the UNC detector 100,000 feet into the atmosphere during the eclipse, when the moon is blocking the sun and its rays.
There have been some published studies that use eclipses to gather information about muon numbers. But the only ones Keuhn knows of collected data during partial eclipses. Monday's total eclipse offered his students a unique opportunity to measure the effects of the sun's rays on detectable muons.
©2017 the Greeley Tribune (Greeley, Colo.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
