CAS CONNECT 2022

The other detectors Benton and his team intend to include will be from a company called HERADO, based in Athens, Greece; the Solar and Terrestrial Physics Institute of Bulgaria; and the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. “This all ties into something that’s called space weather,” Benton said. “There has been a growing appreciation amongst industry that things that are happening on the sun can have really adverse effects on our technology, or on health.” The team is hoping to fill in this niche in the study of space weather that is just now getting new attention, Benton said. Outside of their suborbital tests, Benton’s team is also preparing a detector to fly on a SpaceX rocket to be deployed on the International Space Station in 2023 and is working on detectors for lower-level balloon flights with OSU’s Unmanned Systems Research Institute. Martin Yang, Conner Heffernan, Dr. Eric Benton, Garrett Thornton and Tristen Lee. “With Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, they’re starting this whole idea of space tourism. And we hope to be the radiation dosimetry providers for space tourism, and this is sort of our first shot at that.” Dr. Eric Benton OSU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SC I ENCES 15