A Newfoundland-born scientist is part of an exciting research team working in Antarctica, sending balloons into space to study cosmic rays and the evolution of the universe.
Susan Redmond, a fifth-year graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, originally from Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s, was recently stationed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica as part of an interdisciplinary team of 15 researchers.
Redmond is part of the team working on the Spider II telescope, a six-telescope unit dedicated to studying the cosmic microwave background.
“It examines a kind of afterglow of the Big Bang. And so we put it on a balloon to get over most of the atmosphere,” Redmond told CBC News from Antarctica in December.
“We basically just fly around the continent, so overland all the time, because we have to physically restore the disks to get our data afterwards.”
Long-term research using balloons has been conducted in Antarctica for decades, said Redmond, who could be stationed on the continent for months depending on the weather and the team’s launch window.
“Ballooning is definitely a bit of a messy career type,” she said, laughing. “There’s a lot of uncertainty associated with that, mostly because we’re dependent on the weather.”
After months of preparation on several continents, Redmond and the research team launched the Spider telescope 35 kilometers into space in late December. She has since moved to New Zealand to begin work on another balloon-borne space telescope.
A Memorial University graduate in Co-op Engineering, Redmond also worked with the European Space Agency and NASA before making the transition to a Masters of Applied Science degree and beginning work in Antarctica.
Because she works in a male-dominated field, she said it’s important that the work continues to bring more women like her into academia.
“We had a pretty good team of women in my elementary school class, but it was like 15 percent, 20 percent at most,” she said.
“It’s obviously better than it was, but there are instances where you’re either written off as a diversity attitude. This has happened to me in internships, which is frustrating. But for the most part everyone is supportive and I think there’s a new kind of culture around accountability.”
HEAR | Susan Redmond talks about her work with CrossTalk host Adam Walsh:
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