And it’s off! The BARREL team launched their first balloon on Aug. 10, 2015 from the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden. With the weather finally cooperating, the team was able to launch the first of six balloons in near-perfect conjunction with NASA’s Van Allen Probes. The two missions will compare X-ray measurements to better understand how electrons escape Earth’s radiation belts and make their way to the surface. ..The NASA-funded BARREL – which stands for Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses – measures electrons in the atmosphere near the poles. Such electrons rain down into the atmosphere from two giant radiation belts surrounding Earth, called the Van Allen belts. For its third campaign, BARREL is launching six balloons from the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden. BARREL is led by Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire…Credit: NASA/Dartmouth/Kathryn Waychoff