Meet the BEXUS team: OSTRICH

The OSTRICH team is a collaboration between Radboud University Nijmegen and Eindhoven University of Technology from the Netherlands. The team however features students from various other universities and universities of applied sciences as well. The team started out small, with a few REXUS/BEXUS veterans from the PR4 team, but is growing and currently has 13 members. They have some students with a technical education, but most have a background in a theoretical field and get/have gotten their first experience with engineering and working with hardware during the REXUS/BEXUS program.

The OSTRICH experiment is trying to count cosmic rays and measure which direction they come from. Cosmic rays are particles from space that are produced by for example stars, supernovae and supermassive black holes. These particles fly towards the earth and can be harmful to satellites and astronauts if they don’t have proper protection, but they can also affect the weather and electronics on earth. For example the aurora’s are an effect of low energy cosmic rays coming from the sun. There are also scientists who believe cosmic rays might affect cloud formation. To learn more about the object emitting cosmic rays, and the effects these cosmic rays have on the weather, it is very interesting to know from which direction they came and where they are going. With CubeSats providing opportunities to launch small scale instruments into space, it would be useful to have a network of instruments tracking cosmic rays flying around the earth. OSTRICH is trying to build such an instrument and test it on a BEXUS balloon.

The instrument would be 10x10x30cm to fit in a 3U CubeSat. Inside the instrument there are 4 layers of a scintillator material. This scintillator material will light up when it gets hit by a cosmic ray and this light will be detected by a light sensor. These particles travel very fast, so if multiple layers light up at same time, the particle likely traveled through multiple layers of the instrument. Depending on which layers light up at the same time an approximation can be made of where the particle must have come from.

OSTRICH experiment in a nutshell