Super balloon flight captures first images
The imaging telescope on the super pressure balloon launched from Wānaka earlier this month has captured its first incredible images of space.
The balloon-borne SuperBIT telescope snapped the Tarantula Nebula and Antennae Galaxies, while floating at 108,000 feet above Earth’s surface, in a near-space environment.
It costs far less than launching a space telescope on a rocket but can circumnavigate the globe for up to 100 days, gathering scientific data, at an altitude where it avoids the atmospheric distortion.
The SuperBIT telescope captures images of galaxies in the visible-to-near ultraviolet light spectrum, which is within the Hubble Space Telescope’s capabilities, but with a wider field of view. The goal of the mission is to map dark matter around galaxy clusters by measuring the way these massive objects warp the space around them, also called "weak gravitational lensing".
The Tarantula Nebula is a large star-forming region of ionized hydrogen gas that lies 161,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and its turbulent clouds of gas and dust appear to swirl between the region’s bright, newly formed stars. The Tarantula Nebula has previously been captured by both the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.
The Tarantula Nebula taken by the SuperBIT. Images: NASA / SuperBIT
The Antennae galaxies, catalogued as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, are two large galaxies colliding 60 million light-years away toward the southerly constellation Corvus. The galaxies have previously been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. A composite image of the galaxies combines data taken by all three telescopes.
The SuperBIT team is a collaboration among NASA; Durham University, United Kingdom; the University of Toronto, Canada; and Princeton University in New Jersey.
Here's an interview by Outlet Podcast host Brent Harbour, with NASA's Balloon Program Office chief, Debbie Fairbrother, on the launch:
