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First space images captured by balloon-borne telescope
- TomK32 4y agoSo, 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.
- dontwearitout 4y agoThey have a video of it launching on their instagram (superbit.telescope), it looks like it has a very long tether beneath the balloon
- crazygringo 4y agoI found a photo also of the long tether: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/superbit-low-cost-balloon-borne-telescope-rival-hubble https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/superbit-low-cost-ball... So even if it can't look directly up 90°, it can probably get up to 85° vertical, so it's totally fine.
- dtgriscom 4y agoGood picture, but at least part of that length is yet-to-be-inflated balloon. I'm guessing that the thicker section is the canopy of the descent parachute, so everything above that is likely part of the balloon. Assuming it is, and the balloon inflates to a sphere with the top at the same height, it looks like the telescope can point about 60° above the horizon.
- cozzyd 4y agoHah, I was at CSBF for this launch (working on a different balloon payload...)
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- avhon1 4y agoThis telescope will look at the same angle that a ground-based telescope would -- it's dictated by the object you want to look at.
- detrites 4y ago> 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.
- elbigbad 4y ago“Edge” is doing a lot of work here, haha. In fact, a paper airplane has flown higher than this balloon!
- zeckalpha 4y agoFor others, the definition is generally https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line
- stametseater 4y ago"Edge of space" is a pretty loosey-goosey expression. For instance: "What it takes to fly spy plane U-2 to the edge of space" https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140224-flying-at-the-edge-of-space https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140224-flying-at-the-ed... (The U-2 flies at something around 21 to 25 kilometers, depending on what source you go by.)
- wongarsu 4y agoInteresting. Apparently some people consider the Armstrong Line [1] (where pressure is low enough that water boils at body temperature, at about 18km) to be the start of "near space". As opposed to "outer space" which starts at the Kármán line at 100km (unless you are in the US, where outer space starts at 50miles/80km instead) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit
- 7373737373 4y agoUnfortunately there is no further information about the exposure time of these images
- prewett 4y agoI couldn't even find a repository of the images, which I would assume would have information on exposure time. Makes me wonder if these are testing images. The closest I could find was 17 minutes for an image from their 2016 run. https://www.mn.uio.no/astro/forskning/aktuelt/arrangementer/gjesteforelesninger-seminarer/fredagskollokvium/2019/Mathew-Galloway https://www.mn.uio.no/astro/forskning/aktuelt/arrangementer/...
- marcodiego 4y agoTitle is very misleading. Other balloon-borne telescopes have captured images. These are just the first images of "this specific telescope".
- alexnew 4y agoFunny how this is the same misleading language that tripped up Bard during the Google demo [0]. What's with telescope image headlines and the use of ambiguous language? [0] https://twitter.com/astrogrant/status/1623091683603918849?s=20 https://twitter.com/astrogrant/status/1623091683603918849?s=...
- bee_rider 4y agoOh, 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 4y agoWould suggest renaming to “First space images captured by SuperBIT balloon-borne telescope”
- yellowapple 4y agoOr "Balloon-borne telescope captures its first space images".
- apendleton 4y agoYes, the preceding suggestion still had an (admittedly somewhat implausible) alternative reading, that "its" helps avoid.
- Eduard 4y ago> 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_Imaging_Telescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-pressure_Balloon-borne...
- xingyzt 4y agoAccording 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_pressure_balloon.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-NSF_super_press... 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Super_v_zero_pressure_balloon.jpg# https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Super_v_zero_pressur...
- skykooler 4y agoI think it would be more accurate to say it’s the size of a football field than a stadium.
- p1esk 4y agoSo if we can do these, why do we want to launch super expensive orbital telescopes?
- ahmedfromtunis 4y agoBecause 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.
- dtgriscom 4y agoBecause 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_ 4y agoThe 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.
- fwlr 4y agoFor 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.
- cozzyd 4y agoFor one, they can't fly for too long, and they tend to move around a lot...
- slackfan 4y agoGlad this one wasn't shot down.
- novolunt 4y ago[dead]
- jtwaleson 4y agoThe 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!
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoCan't it all be done computationally?
- jtwaleson 4y agoProbably yes, I meant the entire system for stabilization including electronics.
- Animats 4y agoNice. 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 4y agoThe key metric is buried towards the end of the article: Its mirror has a diameter of 50cm.