[HN Gopher] First space images captured by balloon-borne telescope
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First space images captured by balloon-borne telescope
Author : colinprince
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-04-23 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.utoronto.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.utoronto.ca)
| slackfan wrote:
| Glad this one wasn't shot down.
| Eduard wrote:
| > scientific balloon the size of a football stadium.
|
| In the photo, it doesn't look that big - or does the balloon
| expand significantly more within the high-altitude low-pressure
| atmosphere?
|
| ...
|
| Also: here is the SuperBIT Wikipedia article:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-pressure_Balloon-borne...
| xingyzt wrote:
| According to the description of this NASA image [1], they flew
| a 7-million-cubic-feet super-pressure balloon in 2009.
| Approximating as a perfect sphere, that's around 120 feet in
| radius / 80 yards in diameter. And "When development ends, NASA
| will have a 22 million-cubic-foot balloon", which is around 170
| feet in radius / 110 yards in diameter. These things also look
| squashed when inflated [2], so they're probably even wider
| horizontally. Basically, you can fit an entire football field
| inside along with some stands.
|
| 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-
| NSF_super_press...
|
| 2.
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Super_v_zero_pressur...
| aardvarkr wrote:
| 40 yds*
| xingyzt wrote:
| radius vs diameter
| TomK32 wrote:
| So, the balloon flies above 99.5% of the atmosphere, but the
| telescope hangs under the balloon, so it have to take photos more
| sideways than straight up? Got to be a lot more than 0.5% of the
| atmosphere in the frame then.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| dontwearitout wrote:
| They have a video of it launching on their instagram
| (superbit.telescope), it looks like it has a very long tether
| beneath the balloon
| detrites wrote:
| > The Super Pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT)
| was flown to the edge of space
|
| > SuperBIT flies at an altitude of 33.5 kilometres
|
| Just _no_. I could understand say, shaving a few km off to get
| the project into "space". Maybe ten. I get that space is a bit
| of a blurry boundary and somewhat arbitrary up there.
|
| _But not seventy._
| stametseater wrote:
| "Edge of space" is a pretty loosey-goosey expression. For
| instance:
|
| _" What it takes to fly spy plane U-2 to the edge of space"_
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140224-flying-at-the-ed...
|
| (The U-2 flies at something around 21 to 25 kilometers,
| depending on what source you go by.)
| wongarsu wrote:
| Interesting. Apparently some people consider the Armstrong
| Line [1] (where pressure is low enough that water boils at
| body temperature, at about 18km) to be the start of "near
| space". As opposed to "outer space" which starts at the
| Karman line at 100km (unless you are in the US, where outer
| space starts at 50miles/80km instead)
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit
| elbigbad wrote:
| "Edge" is doing a lot of work here, haha. In fact, a paper
| airplane has flown higher than this balloon!
| zeckalpha wrote:
| For others, the definition is generally
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karman_line
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no further information about the exposure
| time of these images
| prewett wrote:
| I couldn't even find a repository of the images, which I would
| assume would have information on exposure time. Makes me wonder
| if these are testing images. The closest I could find was 17
| minutes for an image from their 2016 run.
|
| https://www.mn.uio.no/astro/forskning/aktuelt/arrangementer/...
| p1esk wrote:
| So if we can do these, why do we want to launch super expensive
| orbital telescopes?
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| Because these are still inside Earth's atmosphere -- there's
| much less of it up there, sure, but even that little air can
| have a great impact.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Title is very misleading. Other balloon-borne telescopes have
| captured images. These are just the first images of "this
| specific telescope".
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(page generated 2023-04-23 23:00 UTC)