Enormous balloon could help astronomers get clear view of space

[muriel_volestrangler]

A balloon the size of a football stadium could help astronomers get crystal-clear shots of space for a fraction of the cost of an orbital telescope like Hubble.

The secret weapon behind the SuperBIT project is a simple helium balloon – albeit one that floats up to 25 miles (40km) above the surface of the Earth and expands to a football-stadium size when fully inflated.
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Its final test flight in 2019 demonstrated “extraordinary pointing stability”, the SuperBIT team says, “with variation of less than one thirty-six thousandth of a degree for more than an hour”. That should allow a telescope to obtain images as sharp as those from the Hubble space telescope.

When the SuperBIT’s balloon is launched from Wanaka, New Zealand, next April, it will circumnavigate the Earth several times, taking pictures all night before recharging its batteries during the day. Eventually, it will return to Earth, but even that brings benefits: the design can be tweaked and improved over time, where conventional orbital telescopes are prohibitively expensive to upgrade.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/21/enormous-balloon-superbit-could-help-astronomers-get-clear-view-of-space

$5 million. Cool.

[LastDemocratInSC]

1. Excellent idea.

Some ground based telescopes with adaptive optics already rival the capabilities of the Hubble telescope. A balloon borne telescope 25 miles up, even without adaptive optics, would probably be almost as good (depending on mirror size).