NASA's super pressure balloon, carrying the Super-BIT telescope, has landed back on Earth after circling the Southern Hemisphere five times.
The balloon, which comprises 18.8-million-cubic-feet, departed on April 16 at 11:42 a.m. from NASA's long-duration balloon program launch site at the Wānaka Airport in New Zealand.
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The pressure balloon landed over southern Argentina, and operators from Palestine, Texas, on the team for NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, brought the object down at 8:37 a.m. EDT on Thursday.
The SuperBIT has been collecting images of galaxy clusters and sending them back through NASA's communications and navigation system.
Welcome home, SuperBIT! ???? After circling the Southern Hemisphere five times, the NASA super pressure balloon carrying the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) science mission has safely returned to Earth.https://t.co/4bt6LLWGOI pic.twitter.com/8uWnmWQdwV
— NASA Wallops (@NASA_Wallops) May 25, 2023
“This flight was, bar none, our best to date with the balloon flying nominally in the stratosphere and maintaining a stable float altitude,” Debbie Fairbrother, NASA’s Balloon Program Office chief at the Agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, said in a statement.
The mission lasted nearly 40 days, floating at 108,000 feet, and the balloon set a record, circling five times around the Southern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes.
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“Achieving long-duration balloon flight through day and night conditions is an important goal for our program and the science community, and this flight has moved the needle significantly in validating and qualifying the balloon technology,” Fairbrother said.
NASA’s Balloon Program will launch its next mission from the Agency’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in July.