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The Big Bang By Balloon
StartsWithABang writes If you want to map the entire sky — whether you're looking in the visible, ultraviolet, infrared or microwave, your best bet is to go to space. Only high above the Earth's atmosphere can you map out the entire sky, with your vision unobscured by anything terrestrial. But that costs millions of dollars for the launch alone! What if you've got new technology you want to test? What if you still want to defeat most of the atmosphere? (Which you need to do, for most wavelengths of light.) And what if you want to make observations on large angular scales, something by-and-large impossible from the ground in microwave wavelengths? You launch a balloon! The Spider telescope has just completed its data-taking operations, and is poised to take the next step — beyond Planck and BICEP2 — in understanding the polarization of the cosmic microwave background.
They are launching it from Antarctica because the ozone hole has expanded so much, from certain angles in the right place the atmosphere lets all the radiation in, so they can get the best measurements.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
How can you make it? By asking rhetorical questions, and ending your sentence with bangs! What if your readers already heard of balloons to map the microwaves over a decade ago? Didn't a balloon go up in the skies? We got some partial results before the WMAP probe picture!, improved from the ealier coarse picture made thanks to the earlier space-based COBE! But hold your breath, we're gonna write new articles and they will end up on slashdot! Bang!
TFA says the experiment uses a reaction wheel (like a gyroscope) to stabilize the payload and point the telescopes azimuthally. It also says the experiment uses the Sun and magnetometers to know where the telescopes are pointing. (It can also use GPS, but that unit failed just after launch.) It is not clear from TFA whether they use adaptive methods to stabilize the images, or just rely on inertia (the payload is heavy) to deal with motion from winds.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If people do not like the show, just don't watch it. (What? If I read the what now? I read part of the subject, like everybody else.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Another Antarctic balloon experiment, BLAST, was designed for re-usability. On its third flight, the parachute failed to properly detach, and ended up dragging the telescope for more than 100 miles across the ice, mostly destroying it.
This doesn't mean that one shouldn't try to recover and reuse experiments, but it does present new program-level risks.
The answer as to "why don't they?" could be as prosaic as: they didn't get funding for a multi-year, multi-launch program, or couldn't squeeze the reusability and refurbishment into their program budget.
(For those interested, that third mission was the subject of a neat documentary film.)
Saying that word is like a party in my mouth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I had visions of sending serial data by balloon, I get here and it's an article about science... What a crock.
Then use hydrogen. It's not like you have a person riding in it to lose if it catches fire.
The problem is not velocity - smooth motion is easy to compensate for, especially when looking at things so far away that your velocity is essentially zero in comparison.
What's hard to compensate for is chaotic turbulence.
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