NASA plans to send a huge balloon to the edge of Earth’s stratosphere in search of secrets about how stars and planets form.
© NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Laboratory / Michael Lentz
NASA’s latest Scientific Balloon project will send a far-infrared telescope to Earth’s stratosphere, more than 24 miles from the surface, to study star formation. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Concept Image Laboratory / Michael Lentz
The space agency’s ASTHROS mission will depart Antarctica in December 2023 and spend three weeks in the stratosphere, the section of the atmosphere where the ozone layer is located. Its components include a soccer field-sized balloon and a specialized far-infrared telescope designed to capture light that the human eye cannot detect.
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Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will begin testing next month. While waiting for its launch, this is what you need to know about NASA’s buoyant observatory.
The instruments
NASA is betting on a balloon that, when inflated, will be 400 feet wide. Hanging below it, a gondola will cradle instruments like a special far-infrared telescope and a cooling system that keep the far-infrared instruments at “absolute zero,” or the coldest temperature that matter can reach.
The telescope is called ASTHROS, an acronym for Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope for high spectral resolution observations at submillimeter wavelengths. Far infrared wavelengths cannot be seen with the human eye, but they can illuminate the density and velocity of gas in parts of space where stars form.
The balloon will float “well below the limit of space” at an altitude of approximately 130,000 feet, still almost 25 miles high. The team can monitor the telescope from the ground and download its data for immediate analysis, the laboratory said.
“We will launch ASTHROS at the edge of space from the most remote and hard part of our planet,” said José Siles, engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and manager of the ASTHROS project. “If you stop to think about it, it’s really challenging, which makes it so exciting at the same time.”
Your mission
Tools hanging below the globe will study star formation and a process called “stellar feedback.”
When supernovae explode, they eject material into space. These “violent explosions” can send material flying and stop star formation or cause the material to build up and speed up the star formation process. Without stellar feedback, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, all of the dust and interstellar gas in the Milky Way would have accumulated into stars.
“I think stellar feedback is understood to be the main regulator of star formation throughout the history of the universe,” said Jorge Pineda, ASTHROS principal investigator. “Computer simulations of the evolution of galaxies still cannot replicate the reality we see in the cosmos. The nitrogen mapping we will be doing with ASTHROS has never been done before, and it will be exciting to see how that information helps make those models more accurate. “
So, to learn more about the process, ASTHROS will hit two targets in the Milky Way galaxy, both “star-forming regions,” where the instrument will create what the lab says is the first 3D printed map of the gas in those regions. Those maps will inform computer simulations of the galaxy’s evolution, the lab said.
Its other two targets are Messier 83, a galaxy about 15 million light-years from Earth and one of the brightest galaxies, and TW Hydrae, a star with a protoplanetary disk, or a disk of dust and gas where they may be. forming planets.
When ASTHROS has completed two or three laps around the South Pole in three to four weeks, its operators on the ground will separate the gondola from the balloon. The gondola and instruments will parachute back to Earth, where they can be reused for future missions.
Testing of ASTHROS cooling systems begins in August, after the launch of NASA’s last Mars rover, Perseverance.
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