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First space images captured by balloon-borne telescope

170 points| colinprince | 2 years ago |utoronto.ca | reply

47 comments

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[+] marcodiego|2 years ago|reply
Title is very misleading. Other balloon-borne telescopes have captured images. These are just the first images of "this specific telescope".
[+] bee_rider|2 years ago|reply
Oh, I misread it, I thought these were the first space images captured, and they just happened to have been captured by a balloon-borne telescope.
[+] ghayes|2 years ago|reply
Would suggest renaming to “First space images captured by SuperBIT balloon-borne telescope”
[+] detrites|2 years ago|reply
> The Super Pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) was flown to the edge of space

> SuperBIT flies at an altitude of 33.5 kilometres

Just no. I could understand say, shaving a few km off to get the project into "space". Maybe ten. I get that space is a bit of a blurry boundary and somewhat arbitrary up there.

But not seventy.

[+] pixl97|2 years ago|reply
Something like 99.6% of the atmosphere is below you at 100,000 feet. This is what matters, not the fact you're in space, but the fact you're not looking through a hot(ish) dense gas filled with moisture.
[+] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
Who cares, given that for a telescope what matters is the fraction of the atmosphere below it and that it is viewing things that are for all practical purposes at infinity it might as well be in space, the images wouldn't be any different unless the angle was very oblique, and even then the difference between being on the ground and being truly in space would be rather smaller for the second.
[+] elbigbad|2 years ago|reply
“Edge” is doing a lot of work here, haha. In fact, a paper airplane has flown higher than this balloon!
[+] Eduard|2 years ago|reply
> scientific balloon the size of a football stadium.

In the photo, it doesn't look that big - or does the balloon expand significantly more within the high-altitude low-pressure atmosphere?

...

Also: here is the SuperBIT Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-pressure_Balloon-borne...

[+] xingyzt|2 years ago|reply
According to the description of this NASA image [1], they flew a 7-million-cubic-feet super-pressure balloon in 2009. Approximating as a perfect sphere, that's around 120 feet in radius / 80 yards in diameter. And "When development ends, NASA will have a 22 million-cubic-foot balloon", which is around 170 feet in radius / 110 yards in diameter. These things also look squashed when inflated [2], so they're probably even wider horizontally. Basically, you can fit an entire football field inside along with some stands.

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-NSF_super_press...

2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Super_v_zero_pressur...

[+] skykooler|2 years ago|reply
I think it would be more accurate to say it’s the size of a football field than a stadium.
[+] jtwaleson|2 years ago|reply
The stabilization mechanics must be very interesting. The earth rotates so it will need to move to track objects. There’s probably also still some vibration from the atmosphere. Then it’s on a tether so any movement will cause it to swing. Pretty cool!
[+] p1esk|2 years ago|reply
So if we can do these, why do we want to launch super expensive orbital telescopes?
[+] fwlr|2 years ago|reply
For some scientific purposes, eliminating 99.6% of the Earth’s atmosphere is approximately the same as eliminating 100% of it. E.g. precise imaging and characterization of nearby interstellar bodies, those projects get Hubble-tier data thousands of times cheaper.

For other scientific purposes, eliminating 99.6% of the Earth’s atmosphere is approximately the same as eliminating 0% of it. E.g. trying to divine the values of physical constants in the earliest moments of the universe by looking as far into the past as possible, those projects are far too sensitive and their observations would be completely swamped by the noise of the remaining 0.4% of Earth’s atmosphere.

[+] dtgriscom|2 years ago|reply
Because orbital telescopes can stay up there for years.

That said, there's a need for both. It takes a whole lot less capital and time to get a telescope up under a balloon, and it can come down, be refurbished, and sent back up again.

[+] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
The James Webb's unique selling point is that it's cooled to -233 degrees science, eliminating a lot of infrared "noise" that an earth-bound telescope would not have.
[+] ahmedfromtunis|2 years ago|reply
Because these are still inside Earth's atmosphere — there's much less of it up there, sure, but even that little air can have a great impact.
[+] cozzyd|2 years ago|reply
For one, they can't fly for too long, and they tend to move around a lot...
[+] TomK32|2 years ago|reply
So, the balloon flies above 99.5% of the atmosphere, but the telescope hangs under the balloon, so it have to take photos more sideways than straight up? Got to be a lot more than 0.5% of the atmosphere in the frame then.
[+] avhon1|2 years ago|reply
This telescope will look at the same angle that a ground-based telescope would -- it's dictated by the object you want to look at.
[+] dontwearitout|2 years ago|reply
They have a video of it launching on their instagram (superbit.telescope), it looks like it has a very long tether beneath the balloon
[+] Animats|2 years ago|reply
Nice. Surprisingly, although balloon-borne optical telescopes were a thing in the 1950s and 1960s, there have been very few since. Wikipedia has a list of balloon-borne telescopes for microwave and X-ray bands.
[+] Tepix|2 years ago|reply
The key metric is buried towards the end of the article: Its mirror has a diameter of 50cm.
[+] 7373737373|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately there is no further information about the exposure time of these images
[+] slackfan|2 years ago|reply
Glad this one wasn't shot down.