A massive balloon – big enough to engulf a Boeing 747 and toting 6,000 pounds of high-tech instruments – rose slowly over Fort Sumner, N.M., this month.
It was headed for the edge of space.
Made of 4,000 pounds of plastic that is thinner than a dry-cleaning bag, the balloon soared 120,000 feet high, to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where the sky turns dark.
“It’s like being in space. You can see stars everywhere,” said Jack Fox, an engineer at the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Fox and his NCAR colleagues announced their successful test flight Thursday, after analyzing data from the sun-studying telescope that dangled from the balloon.
The Oct. 3 flight will enable the team to move ahead with a 2009 scientific mission to study the sun, and it also may offer a cheaper way to study space than using satellites and spacecraft.
The entire balloon mission, including the reusable gondola, the one-use balloon and the $30,000 of helium to launch it – will probably end up costing about $1 million, Fox said.
An “inexpensive” satellite or spacecraft launched on a rocket costs $150 million, he said.
Alan Stern, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said he called the NCAR team with congratulations after the flight.
“I’ve wanted to put more emphasis on suborbital flight …,” Stern said. “This means a lot to us.”
Wesley Traub, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called NCAR’s test flight “wonderful.”
Traub has been working on NASA missions to search for planets circling stars other than the sun.
Tight NASA budgets have canceled immediate plans for a space mission, so Traub said he’s now turning to balloon science.
The goal of the test flight was to make sure the gondola system held a test telescope stable enough to point it at the sun and capture high-resolution images, said Michael Knoelker, director of NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory.
“It looks like we have achieved what we wanted,” he said.
The engineering of the balloon project took the NCAR team more than six years.
In the summer of 2009, NCAR will probably launch from Kiruna, Sweden, a 3-foot-diameter research telescope, which will provide the highest-resolution images ever taken of the sun, Knoelker said.
The high-resolution images of the sun should lead to a better understanding of that star’s role in climate on Earth, and storms on the sun’s surface that can affect satellites and communications on Earth.
The engineers and scientists who watched the first launch said they can’t wait for a chance to witness another.
“It’s a lot more elegant. It’s a lot more beautiful to watch than a rocket launch,” Fox said.
“It’s almost like a ballet.
“The sound is amazing. You hear this huge mass of polyethylene rising into the sky,” Fox said.
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
