NASA mission to use balloon larger than football field to send telescope above Antarctica
NASA's upcoming mission, the Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope for High Spectral Resolution Observations at Submillimeter-wavelengths (ASTHROS) will use a balloon larger than a football field to send a telescope about 40,000 meters above Antarctica, where it will study a phenomenon that chokes off star formation in some galaxies, effectively killing them.
ASTHROS will use a 2.5-meter primary mirror, which is also the telescope's main light-gathering tool, that's tied for the largest ever to fly on a high-altitude stratospheric balloon.
High up in the stratosphere (at an altitude of about 130,000 feet), ASTHROS will observe wavelengths of light that are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere and can't be observed from the ground. The telescope's giant mirror will enhance its ability to observe fainter light sources and resolve finer details of those sources, according to NASA.
The telescope will observe several star-forming regions in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, where stellar feedback - a process by which clouds of gas and dust are dispersed in galaxies - takes place and create high-resolution 3D maps of the distribution and motion of gas. It will also look at distant galaxies containing millions of stars to see how feedback plays out at large scales and in different environments.
The mission is set to launch no earlier than December 2023 from NASA's Long Duration Balloon Facility in Antarctica, near McMurdo Station.
Telescopes in space are designed differently than those on Earth – but what about telescopes meant to operate in between? The upcoming NASA ASTHROS mission will use a balloon larger than a football field to send a telescope into Earth’s stratosphere. More: https://t.co/ZWOhI1DdTo pic.twitter.com/dvwi46Ny5R
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) June 29, 2022
Why balloon missions?
According to NASA, these missions typically cost less than space missions and take less time to move from early planning to deployment, and they employ new technologies that can be used on future space missions. The agency's Scientific Balloon Program launches 10 to 15 balloon missions each year.