A stadium-sized helium balloon will be used to lift the next telescope NASA And Canada’s space agency wants to send it to the upper levels of Earth’s atmosphere, according to a report from Gizmodo. to telescope. called the successor of Hubble telescope and named Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope Or SuperBIT for short. it is designed by University of Torontohandjob Princeton University and Durham University in England, in conjunction with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, and is scheduled to launch from New Zealand in March 2022. Balloon-borne telescopes can stay in the stratosphere for weeks and months.
Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope: Objectives
The main purpose of SuperBIT is “to provide insight into the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters and in the large-scale structure of the universe,” says the University of Toronto website post. A 532,000 cubic meter helium balloon is about to lift Superbeat 25 miles into the sky. It cost about $5 million to build this telescope. One of the purported benefits of SuperBIT is its advantage in not being affected by weather changes such as cloudy nights or haze caused by forest fires because it would be located in the stratosphere, above the troposphere, and therefore, mostly will be clear and unaffected by weather conditions as most weather activity occurs in the troposphere. SuperBIT will charge at night with the help of solar panels designed into its structure, image, and thus circumnavigate the globe.
Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope: Why is it needed?
The report quoted Mohamed Shaban, a member of the SuperBIT team, as saying that the Hubble telescope is aging and also oversubscribed, meaning it has more work orders coming in than it should. So the need for new telescopes arose that could support Hubble in observing space.
According to the report, a telescope with an optical system three times larger than SuperBIT is also in the works. It will be called GigaBIT and is expected to undergo the first test flight in September 2022. by Euclid’s telescope european space agency Also scheduled for launch next year.
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