A telescope
lashed to a giant balloon is poised to lift off from Sweden as early as Monday
to study the surface of the sun.
Dubbed
Sunrise, the balloon observatory should stay aloft for nearly a week as it
travels from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden over the arctic to a safe
touchdown in Canada. The mission is part of a NASA experiment for balloon
launches and is slated to fly up to six days to snap high-resolution
photographs of the sun's surface.
The telescope
and its gondola of scientific instruments are a 2-ton payload that will be
borne under a balloon that is larger than a sports arena, filled with nearly 34
million cubic feet of helium. It should cross the arctic at an altitude of
nearly 23 miles (37 km). To track the sun while it floats above Earth, the
gondola has a pointing system that allows it to rotate horizontally.
Through
Sunrise, scientists seek to demystify some of the fascinating and destructive
phenomena caused by magnetic fields on the sun's surface. Those fields can
be associated with sunspots and explosive coronal mass ejections which lead to
space weather events that can affect the climate here on Earth. Space weather,
like energetic
solar flares and solar winds, can damage satellites in Earth's orbit,
endanger astronauts and even disrupt power grids on the ground.
Sunrise
project managers plan to launch the solar telescope on June 1, but could try
throughout early July to await pristine weather conditions.
Sunrise is
part of a NASA experiment with balloon-launched research projects, this one in
conjunction with scientists and agencies from Germany, Spain and the United
States. Using balloons, NASA seeks to cut the cost of launching orbital
satellites. While Sunrise is estimated to cost $60 million to $80 million, the
cost of launching a similar-sized telescope into orbit might run as high as
$500 million, Michael Knolker, director of National Center for Atmospheric
Research's High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colo., told SPACE.com last
year.
This is the
gondola's second launch after a successful test-run over the Columbia
Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in 2007. In
that test, the balloon launched without the telescope.
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