Balloons are also cheaper than rocket fuel and the ability to return the payload to Earth and relaunch it means that its design has been tweaked and improved over several test flights. With a budget for construction and operation for the first telescope of $5m (£3.6m), SuperBIT cost almost 1,000 times less than a similar satellite. SuperBIT is scheduled to launch on the next long duration balloon, from Wanaka, New Zealand, in April 2022.Ĭarried by seasonal winds, it will circumnavigate the Earth several times - imaging the sky all night, then using solar panels to recharge its batteries during the day. However, Nasa recently developed ‘superpressure’ balloons able to contain helium for months.

Previous efforts for similar telescopes held aloft by balloons were deemed too difficult as they could stay aloft for only a few nights at a time before needing to refuel. The team behind the telescope believe that this level of stability should enable it to obtain images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope. Its final test flight in 2019 demonstrated that it could be pointed at specific points in the sky with high stability – monitored for more than one hour, the lens deviated by less than one thirty-six thousandth of a degree. The SuperBIT has a 0.5 metre diameter mirror and will be carried to a 40km altitude by a helium balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic metres, about the size of a football stadium. Observatories on the ground are built at high altitude sites to overcome some of this, but until now only placing a telescope in space can escape the effects of the atmosphere completely. While light from distant galaxies can travel for billions of years to reach our telescopes, once it reaches the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere the view becomes blurred. Developed by Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency, the 'Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope' (SuperBIT) flies above 99.5 per cent of the Earth’s atmosphere and is carried by a helium balloon the size of a football stadium.

Helium ultra balloon