That's it, that's the data that we have been looking for this whole time. Actually, I lied, that's not the data that we were looking for in the balloon launch. Unfortunately, the launch wasn't until August 2nd, so we had to settle for a dry run down here on the ground.
Starting from an initial altitude of 1,500 meters here in Greeley Colorado, we hiked straight up to Spearhead Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, to end at a final elevation of 3,600 meters. The whole way, our Geiger counter was recoding data, which produced this beautiful scatter plot of the various counts per minute. As you can see, the counts initially only stay around 20 when down here at 1,500, but they slowly climb throughout the hike to finish with an average closer to 60 at the summit of the mountain. This confirms our hypothesis about muon flux increasing with elevation, as the muon occurrences seem to increase almost exponentially throughout the hike.
Sadly, this means that we were unable to test the second half of our hypothesis concerning the predicted decline in the muon flux past 15 kilometers. Oh well, what can you do? The balloon will launch August 2nd, 2014, so hopefully we'll be able to get a final verdict on this experiment once it comes back, hopefully in one piece.
Starting from an initial altitude of 1,500 meters here in Greeley Colorado, we hiked straight up to Spearhead Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, to end at a final elevation of 3,600 meters. The whole way, our Geiger counter was recoding data, which produced this beautiful scatter plot of the various counts per minute. As you can see, the counts initially only stay around 20 when down here at 1,500, but they slowly climb throughout the hike to finish with an average closer to 60 at the summit of the mountain. This confirms our hypothesis about muon flux increasing with elevation, as the muon occurrences seem to increase almost exponentially throughout the hike.
Sadly, this means that we were unable to test the second half of our hypothesis concerning the predicted decline in the muon flux past 15 kilometers. Oh well, what can you do? The balloon will launch August 2nd, 2014, so hopefully we'll be able to get a final verdict on this experiment once it comes back, hopefully in one piece.