NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon takes off from New Zealand

The Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) carrying the Superbit science mission from Wanaka, New Zealand, floated to an altitude of 33.5 kilometers on Sunday and became fully inflated as winds blew across the southern hemisphere of the latitude band. Average. NASA’s Science Balloon Program successfully launched its football-stadium-sized heavy-lift SPB on a mission lasting 100 or more days.

“Mother Nature shined beautifully today and gave us the perfect conditions for an amazing launch,” said Debbie Fairbrother, head of NASA’s balloon science program. “I’m excited about this mission and the cutting-edge science it will do.”

The flight path of the balloon is controlled by the wind speed and direction at the buoyancy height. Expeditions spend most of their time over water And for any ground missions, NASA works with the US State Department to coordinate the country’s overflight clearances.

However Validation of super pressure balloon technology As the primary mission of the flight, the balloon carries the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) at Princeton University, which uses a wide field of view to image large galaxies from a close-up space from a balloon platform.

By measuring the way these massive objects distort the space around them, also known as “weak gravitational lensing,” SuperBIT can map the themes in these clusters.

A second SPB flight is planned and the Extreme Universe Space Observatory 2 (EUSO-2), A University of Chicago project aimed to take advantage of data collected during the 2017 expedition. EUSO-2 will detect ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles from beyond our galaxy as they penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. The origin of these particles is not well understood, so the data collected by EUSO-2 will help solve this scientific mystery.

Maintaining a constant hovering height in the stratosphere is a formidable challenge for airborne systems., including balloons. Most standard zero-pressure heavy-lift balloons vary in altitude by 13.7 kilometers due to the alternating heating and cooling of the day-night cycle. In response, mission operators typically release more weight in the form of altitude-maintaining ballast. The SPB, in contrast, is designed to maintain a positive internal pressure and shape regardless of its surroundings, keeping the balloon stable at a constant buoyancy altitude.

A 532,000 cubic meter balloon is filled with helium It is the size of a football field When its operational float is fully inflated to an altitude of 33.5 km.

Vanaga is NASA’s dedicated launch site for mid-latitude long-duration balloon missions. NASA operates SPB launches from New Zealand in partnership with Queenstown Airport Corporation, Queenstown Lake District Council, the New Zealand Space Agency and Airways New Zealand.

NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia manages the agency’s science balloon flight program 10 to 15 flights every year from launch sites around the world. Beraton, which operates NASA’s Columbia Science Balloon Facility (CSBF) in Texas, provides mission planning, engineering services and field operations for NASA’s science balloon program. The CSBF team has launched more than 1,700 scientific balloons in nearly 40 years of operation. NASA balloons are manufactured by Aerostar. The NASA Balloon Science Program is funded by the Astrophysics Division of the Science Operations Directorate at NASA Headquarters.