Jeff Filippini

54 years ago today, the Apollo 16 team used George Carruthers' UV camera on the Moon to give us our first look at Earth's exosphere. Today the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory @uofigrainger, 4x farther than the Moon, studies it daily in unprecedented detail.

Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy! 🫶 The Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end.

A new milestone for humankind: The crew of Artemis II are now the farthest any human has ever travelled, reaching a maximum distance of 252,752 miles from Earth. This surpasses the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 by about 4,102 miles.

Obituary: Anthony Leggett (1938-2026) Physicist who brought quantum theory to the macro world go.nature.com/413cRq7

Pretty cool that the LUX detector can detect decays of Xenon isotopes with a half life of 10^(22) years.

A Nobel-winning mind. A lasting Illinois legacy. It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of Sir Anthony J. “Tony” Leggett, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair Emeritus of Physics and a member of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty since 1983.

#TBT to 70 years ago when @NSF’s McMurdo Station opened in Antarctica. @NASA science performed at and near McMurdo includes high-altitude scientific balloon launches to collect cosmic light and particles at the very edge of space. More about the station: nsf.gov/geo/opp/ail/mc…

We shall measure stellar brightness logarithmically, and it will be called the "magnitude." - Sir, will that logarithm be base 10, or based on Napier's constant? Neither. It shall be of the base of the fifth root of one hundred.

One of the annual #southpole traditions at the start of winter is watching John Carpenter's #thething in the gym. A fitting start to over 8 months of isolation for the 40 winterovers after becoming officially stranded at a remote Antarctic base! #Antarctica

Congratulations to our scientific balloon teams on another successful campaign from Antarctica! The campaign began in early December and completed 4 launches supporting @NASAUniverse experiments! go.nasa.gov/3LTC8z6

The NASA Scientific Ballooning Handbook 50th Anniversary Edition is out! It's amazing, it's free and it's here: ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/2024…

On New Years Day at the #southpole, there is a ceremony to move the geographic South Pole (since the ice underneath the station moves about 10-meters per year) and a reveal of a new marker on top of the Pole. See some pics by Anjali from this years ceremony. #Antarctica @NSF

This is exactly the analogy I use in my first lecture each semester. The goal of your coursework is how it changes you.

So far, @NASA completed the planned launch schedule for 2025/2026 Antarctic campaign and have four balloons circling in the polar vortex: #GAPS, #PUEO, and two calibration flights for PUEO, HICAL I and HICAL II. Balloon Program's next year plans still undisclosed.

NASA launched a second scientific balloon from Antarctica Dec. 19 at 11:56 a.m. ET. The balloon is carrying NASA’s Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) mission, designed to detect radio signals created when neutrinos from space hit ice. Track the mission now: csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon9/f…

Next season we're excited to bring our TIM payload down to the ice to study the history of star formation in our universe. sites.google.com/view/obscos/re…

Congratulations to the PUEO @NASA balloon mission, off to study neutrinos from the skies over Antarctica!

Pueo is launching! #Antarctica #southpole @NASA Watch live here: video.ibm.com/channel/nasa-c…

Three days after launch, the GAPS (dark matter) balloon is doing well. Waiting for PUEO to launch, the balloon facility webcam is still capturing interesting activity: a LC-130 on deck and an Emperor penguin in the foreground @NASA #Antarctica csbf.nasa.gov/antarctica/pay…

A new view of our Earth's outermost atmosphere from the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory team at @uofigrainger @UofIllinois !