ARCS Scholar Scott Mackey joined a NASA project in 2022, when he arrived in Chicago to pursue a PhD in Physics. This past fall, Mackey went to Antarctica as a team member on project PUEO – a NASA long-duration balloon mission looking for subatomic particles from space called neutrinos. These neutrinos create a detectable spark of radio waves when they hit the Antarctic ice sheet.

Mackey’s lab at the University of Chicago, known as the Vieregg Group, is leading the NASA project. The team recently spent six weeks at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

 “We are hoping to detect the highest energy neutrinos that are predicted to exist but have never been seen before. They are thought to originate in the extreme environments around supermassive black holes in distant galaxies and get shot through space all the way to Earth,” Mackey explains.

“It was summertime in the southern hemisphere,” Mackey says, “so most days hovered around 15 F, but then often the wind chill would bring it down to -15. I didn’t have much free time, but when I did, I explored the station and hiked the unique landscape in the surrounding area.”

Mackey recalls the best experience as flying an hour from McMurdo through glacial canyons up to a plateau in East Antarctica. There, his team set up an automated antenna ground station to beam up calibration signals for the balloon payload when it flew overhead.

“It was at 8,000 ft elevation, and the temperature was -30 F, so we were definitely moving a bit slower than we expected,” he explains. “We had to dig deep holes in the snow to bury parts we didn’t want flying away in the wind, and I had to practice knot tying so that we could secure everything on the surface. I had to learn how to use a survival kit before I went out there in case anything went wrong.”

He credits ARCS for supporting this incredible opportunity.

“Thanks to funding from ARCS, I was able to buy all the warm clothes and gear I needed to be prepared for this expedition, so there was nothing holding me back from getting the science done,” he says

It will take a year for the Vieregg lab and team to read, analyze, and write papers from the PUEO data drives. Mackey is now doing photogrammetry – analyzing photos from before the balloon launch to know the exact geometry of everything on the payload.

“It’s important we measure the small deviations between the blueprints and reality because these can affect how we interpret the signals recorded in our data,” he explains. “I hope we see a neutrino signal in the data and can reconstruct the direction in the sky that it came from. It would be amazing to be able to point at a galaxy millions of light-years away and say we measured a particle that traveled all the way to us.”

Mackey shared his Antarctica experience with the ARCS Illinois board. He has two more years to finish his PhD, and he is joining a telescope project in Antarctica.

“It is definitely a difficult time to be a young scientist,” he says. The future of my field and my career is uncertain. I’m just going to do cool science as long as I can. I hope that people who understand the importance of basic research will continue to support and advocate for science in America,” he says.

Read more about Mackey’s research: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/antarctica-balloon-lands-after-23-day-search-particles-outer-space