They will launch a telescope suspended from a giant balloon capable of rivaling Hubble

A new astronomical telescope is scheduled to launch next year العام In the upper atmosphere it is attached to a balloon the size of a football field, with the goal of capturing images that rival those of Hubble, as announced in a statement to the scientists responsible for the project.

Portable Ultra Pressure Imaging Telescope (or SuperBIT) has a diameter of 0.5 meters and will be lifted to a height of 40 kilometers by means of a helium balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic meters.

The telescope, developed by the universities of Durham, Toronto and Princeton, in partnership with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, will go into operation for the first time in April 2022, when Posted from New Zealand to circumnavigate the world while filming the universe.

The latest flight test, conducted in 2019, showed “exceptional steering stability” which, according to the researchers, will allow it to obtain images as sharp as those of the Hubble Space Telescope. Additionally, you can Stay in the air for months thanks to NASA’s new ultra-pressure balloon designCompared to normal balloons, which can only stay in the air for a few days.

The budget to build and operate the first telescope worth 5 million dollars. In this sense, SuperBIT costs about 1,000 times less than a similar satellite.

New balloon technology makes space travel cheap زيارة, easy and environmental,” emphasizes Mohamed Shaaban, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, in the statement, adding that SuperBIT also “can be constantly reconfigured and updated.”

The science goal of the 2022 flight will be to measure the properties of dark matter particles, as published RT.