Slashdot Mirror
Huge Balloon Lofts New Telescope
Science Daily is reporting that a new solar telescope has been launched via an enormous balloon filled with helium. Dubbed project "Sunrise" the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar Physics, Spain's Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands, and the Swedish Space Corporation all partnered to launch the balloon in order to view never before see features of the Sun. "The project may usher in a new generation of balloon-borne scientific missions that cost less than sending instruments into space. Scientists also can test an instrument on a balloon before making a commitment to launch it on a rocket. The balloon, with its gondola of scientific instruments, was launched successfully on the morning of October 3 from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. It flew for about 10 hours, capturing stable images of the solar surface and additional data from the various instruments of the sophisticated payload. The gondola then separated from the balloon and descended with a parachute, landing safely in a field outside Dalhart, Texas."
What were the results of experiment #1? The curious public wants to know!
The game.
A) The went at night.
Wouldn't the images not be as clear because of the Earths' atmosphere? It would still probably be better quality images then a ground based telescope. Why not just use a plane and add some technology to steady the camera?
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Perhaps then they can investigate how sun variations impacts global warming?
What if the balloon pops? Isn't that a lot of incredibly expensive equipment thats going to go tumbling down? I can just see that advertisements of pranksters now... Classified Ad: Looking to charter a private airplane flight and hire a professional marksman
are belong to Haliburton.
> landing safely in a field outside Dalhart, Texas.
whereupon it was shot to smithereens by a farmer shouting "The Russians are here, The Russians are here!"
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Though this sounds like a very interesting project, the use of balloons (and sounding rockets) for instruments that might later fly in space is not new. Cosmic ray studies have been using balloons for since 1912.
What may be new here is using balloons for instruments that need to be aimed precisely. Detectors on previous balloons were usually omni-directional, or could make measurements over large surface angles. Their Sun-tracking technology aiming sounds interesting, and I look forward to reading about their results
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
The payload (SUNRISE) is designed to carry a 1-meter telescope with a full complement of scientific instruments. This flight had a small (30 cm) stand-in telescope, to test the active pointing system, and a camera with a small array of narrowband filters, to see what wavelengths are visible from the flight altitude.
Strangely enough, some the components of sunlight at 120,000 feet altitude are not well known. Some interesting ultraviolet lines (the "h" and "k" lines from Magnesium) are thought to be visible there, that are not visible on the ground -- but nobody has yet characterized the ultraviolet absorption spectrum from the very upper layers of the stratosphere and from the mesosphere. Most telescopes that have flown so high were rocketing through on their way to space, rather than floating under a balloon. So this first flight was both to test the pointing (and other flight control) systems, and to double check that some desired wavelengths are present and usable at the target altitude.
Even the test flight of SUNRISE was a real accomplishment: it is far from the ideal of small, cheap, lightweight, quick-and-dirty payloads under scientific balloons, and is run more like a space mission both in terms of payload complexity and in terms of team management. The team is multinational and the payload is subject to rigorous engineering and testing.
The balloon flight environment is in some ways more harsh than the vacuum of space: payloads are subjected to wild temperature swings on climbout, and the thermal environment is not nearly as controllable as it is in empty space. On the other hand, launch and flight are very gentle compared to unmanned space shots.
While the scope and precision of this project appears to be admirable and new, the idea of using balloons to loft telescopes is most certainly not, though the summary and article may both give that impression. They launch balloons in Antarctica all the time for astronomical observations (remember BOOMERANG?) and much of the initial attempts to view the universe through non-optical, non-radio wavelengths (the ones where our atmosphere is basically opaque) was done with balloons in addition to the sounding rockets.
I have a test for plans.
If the plan is easily thwarted by a red-neck with a pellet gun, the plan should get thrown out.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
that's a space station!
I have it on good authority from a NASA insider that this is the mission overview for STS-121:
:/
Day 1: Launch
Day 2: Inspect shuttle thermal protection system for damage.
Day 3: Inspect shuttle thermal protection system for damage.
Day 4: Repair thermal protection system.
Day 5: Repair thermal protection system.
Day 6: Repair thermal protection system.
Day 7: Re-inspect shuttle thermal protection system for damage.
Day 8: Mission conclusion, return to Earth.
-Ponga
>landing safely in a field outside Dalhart, Texas.
redundant.
What else is there to hit outside of Dalhart?
There are people working on using airships (balloons) to get to orbit more cheaply...
http://www.jpaerospace.com/
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Imagination Land?
With all our talk of "being green" a balloon the size of a 747 coming down in the ocean would equal a big blob of pollution. Does it break down easy? Do they recover it? I did RTFA and didn't find anything on the after use cleanup. And that IS on really big blob of balloon.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There are renewable resources (trees, etc.) and non-renewable resources (oil, etc.). But at least the raw elements of these resources stay around on Earth, and can conceivably be used again in the future for something else. In essense, the elemental composition of the earth has remained mostly constant for the past few billion years; it's only the molecules that the elements are bound up in and where that changes over time. Put it this way, if humans die off tomorrow, there'll be plenty of new oil for the insect overlords that evolve in a billion years, because the raw material for the oil is still churning around in the Earth's biological and geological systems.
But helium... well, helium is special. It has two interesting properties. Firstly, it is a very light element. Hydrogen and helium are so light that as individual atoms they freely escape the Earth's gravitational system and leak out into space. That means forever. Secondly, it is completely inert. It does not and cannot bind to any other molecule to weigh it down. This is in contrast to hydrogen, which is almost always bound up in a molecule of some sort. Thus, helium is the ONLY element that, when released into the atmosphere, will eventually leak out into space and be lost to the Earth forever. The only reason we have helium on Earth now is because a bunch of it is trapped in sand particles (that's where we mine it from). But once we mine it and use it, it's gone. And I mean gone gone. Deep space gone. Helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe (and the sun has a lot of it), but unless it's available on Earth, that fact is completely useless to us. We can't make new helium, other than through nuclear fusion of two hydrogen atoms. And that's not a manufacturing process we (or the future insect overlords) are ever going to undertake.
And this is all a great shame, too, since helium, being the lightest inert gas, is incredibly useful. I can't help but think that in a few hundred years (yes, I realize that it's probably that far away) humans will be kicking themselves for having blown helium in such great quantities in complete disregard for the fact that it could never, for the rest of humanity and beyond, be used again.
Think about that the next time you order a dozen helium balloons for your kid's next birthday party!
They sent a great ball of helium up into space in order to get a better look at a great ball of helium up in space?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Was it just me that imagined an erect telescope with two big BALLoons lifting it up?
TFA: The balloon is designed to carry 6,000 pounds of equipment, including a 1-meter (39-inch) solar telescope...
Compare to:
Stratoscope II was the largest and most sophisticated balloon-borne astronomical telescope flown in the 1960s and early 1970s. A follow-on project to Stratoscope I, a 12-inch balloon born telescope conceived by Martin Schwarzschild, it was a 36-inch reflector mounted in a 3.5-ton stabilized gondola and studied the infra-red molecular composition of planetary atmospheres, the atmospheres of red giant stars. (They had photos of this on the corridor walls when I studied astronomy at Princeton. It needed a substantial sized truck to carry it.)
I'm sure there is good, innovative stuff being done here - but merely using a balloon is not it. I expect that one advance is in mission duration. I didn't quickly find the flight duration for Stratoscope II, but likely it was a few hours, compared to "as long as two weeks" for this telescope. And, of course, it will have much superior detectors.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Sounds like someone is a little excited about their balloon flight. First of all, congratulations on a successful flight!
Now telescopes flying on balloons are not new.
HERO (High Energy Remote Observatory) Balloon project flew it's 4th flight last spring from Ft. Sumner. http://wwwastro.msfc.nasa.gov/research/hero/hero_index.html
GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) flew back in 2006.
Caltech's Boomerang balloon http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~lgg/boomerang_front.htm
And many more http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/
I am always happy when a colleague has a successful flight...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Rest of us wondered what size were the nipples on those balloons.
I'm not gonna go into that what was going on with our telescopes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So the gondola was safely parachuted back to the ground. But what about the balloon? Is it still floating around up there somewhere, above 120Kft? If they launch a whole bunch of these balloons, won't they eventually offer a floating layer dispersed at 25 miles up? At 130Kft, the distance to the horizon is over 400mi in each direction, or 800mi between opposite horizons. So 30 balloons could see each other, and the ground, in a chain around the world. Less than 300 balloons could cover the under 150Km^2 land area, and under 75000 could cover the entire surface. The 126Mm circumference could signal between any two points in under 0.5s.
I encourage NASA to launch many more of these balloons. Then I encourage someone to fund me flying around among them attaching WiFi APs with Pringles cans to them. 5. PROFIT!!!
--
make install -not war