A Super-Pressure Balloon Will Keep This Telescope in the Air for Weeks
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SuperBIT in a 2016 test flight over Texas. (Image: Richard Massey / Durham University)
A unique telescope is set to launch from New Zealand in April 2022, designed to survey the gravitational lensing that occurs when galactic clusters collide. The instrument, called SuperBIT, will be suspended by a stadium-sized helium balloon in Earth’s stratosphere.
A team from the University of Toronto, Princeton University, and Durham University in England, in conjunction with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, designed SuperBIT to be a demonstrative telescope, meant to show off a new technology (similar to the Ingenuity helicopter’s purpose on Mars). SuperBIT has a half-metre-wide mirror and will be lifted 40 km into the sky by a balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic metres. The telescope is budgeted to cost $7 million to both build and operate, a bargain compared to a space-based observatory.