Engineering alumna’s work with balloon telescopes is out of this world

Susan Redmond (B.Eng.’15) is hooked on spacecrafts – telescope balloons, to be exact.

Ms. Redmond always knew she wanted to work in the space industry. But it was during an internship at the European Space Agency when her passion really took off. Following that experience, she completed a master of engineering in aerospace engineering at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Aerospace Studies, which led her to work with balloon telescopes – a type of sub-orbital telescope suspended below a stratospheric balloon.

The SuperBIT, a super-pressure, balloonborne imaging telescope, was assembled, tested and launched in late-March.

“SuperBIT is an optical-to-near-ultraviolet telescope that studies dark matter via galaxy cluster weak lensing. It is at an altitude of approx. 35 kilometres,” she said.

Ms. Redmond, who has participated in two of the four one-night test flights SuperBIT has performed over the past eight years, is responsible for the thermal design and control and assisting with the optical, structural and pointing subsystems.

Prior to working in New Zealand, she was in Antarctica at the McMurdo Station working on a balloon-borne telescope called the SPIDER-II.

“SPIDER-II is a microwave polarimeter that studies the afterglow of the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background) using six telescopes housed in a vacuum vessel filled with liquid helium to cool the detectors to 300 milli-Kelvin (approximately -272.8 degrees C),” Ms. Redmond explained. “The instrument was lifted by a balloon the size of a rugby stadium to an altitude of 35 kilometres for approximately two weeks.”

When the experiments conclude, the payload separates from the balloon and parachutes back down to Earth. The hard drives, which hold the data, are recovered, as well as the payload carcass.

For the New Zealand and Antarctica flights, teams conducted a pre-deployment integration campaign in Palestine, Texas. “This past summer, both SPIDER-II and SuperBIT were fully assembled and tested in Palestine, then disassembled and shipped to Antarctica and New Zealand, respectively,” said Ms. Redmond. “The recovery for the payload in Antarctica was more difficult and required a team to be flown out to the landing site to retrieve the instrument. The entire structure must be retrieved, if it is safe to do so, to minimize pollution of the environment. This means a lot of the structure must be chopped up to fit into the small plane that is used for recovery.”

The telescope balloon researchers work |with two balloon launch providers: NASA and the Centre national d’études spatiales.

Ms. Redmond is currently completing a doctor of philosophy degree at Princeton University and will finish this spring. She plans to start a post-doctoral position in the fall, focusing on high-contrast imaging work. With the upcoming launch of the Roman Space Telescope and the development of the Habitable World’s Observatory, there are exciting projects in her future.

Working as part of a team is not new to Ms. Redmond. When she was a student at Memorial, she says there was a saying that “engineering is a team sport.”

“I think this was one of my favourite things about the program, everyone was working to try and make sure everyone succeeded. Whether it was an exam or an interview, there was always a very collaborative and friendly approach among my classmates, as well as the class above us.”

Her advice to current students? Be creative and look far and wide for work-term opportunities.

“There are lots of really cool things to do in research labs around the world. Email professors and use your connections. Don’t be afraid to jump on an opportunity that surprises you.” ■■■