A telescope will be launched into the upper atmosphere strapped to a balloon the size of a stadium next year, and it will be able to take images that rival Hubble, scientists behind the project claim.
Named the SuperBIT, it will fly up 28 miles above the Earth’s surface and circumnavigate the globe while taking images of the universe.
It will make its operational debut in April 2022 when it will be deployed from New Zealand by the team from the University of Toronto and NASA.
The telescope has a 0.5 metre diameter mirror and will be able to remain in the air for months at a time thanks to a new NASA superpressure balloon design.
Unlike the James Webb telescope, launching in November and working in infrared, SuperBIT will operate in similar frequencies of light to Hubble, leaving the scientists behind the project to tout it as a natural successor to the ageing observatory.
It cost about $5 million (£3.6m), a fraction of the $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) Hubble cost to launch, and can be taken down for repair or upgrade on a regular basis.
The SuperBIT balloon in flight, above NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, Texas, in June 2016 during tests to prepare for the main mission in 2022
A SuperBIT optical and ultraviolet composite image of the ‘Pillars of Creation’, trunks of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light years away in the direction of the constellation of Serpens
Durham, Toronto and Princeton Universities teamed up with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to build this unique type of floating observatory, with the possibility of a whole fleet of airborne telescopes in the future.
When deployed, attached to a football stadium sized helium balloon, it should obtain high-resolution images of distant galaxies, planets in our solar system and stars.
Mohamed Shaaban, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, said light from a distant galaxy can travel for billions of years to reach our telescopes.
‘In the final fraction of a second, the light has to pass through the Earth’s swirling, turbulent atmosphere and our view of the universe becomes blurred,’ he said.
Observatories on the ground are built at high altitude sites, with many constructed in Chile more than 2,000 metres above sea level, to overcome some of this.
Until now only placing a telescope in space escapes the effect of the atmosphere completely, with balloons not able to remain aloft long enough.
The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (or SuperBIT) has a 0.5 metre diameter mirror and is carried to 40km altitude by a helium balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic metres, about the size of a football stadium.
Its final test flight in 2019 demonstrated extraordinary pointing stability, with variation of less than one thirty-six thousandth of a degree for more than an hour.
Meaning the telescope is able to focus on a single point of light for long enough to gather considerable data and take stunning images.
This should enable a telescope to obtain images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, explained the team.
‘Nobody has done this before, not only because it is exceedingly difficult, but also because balloons could stay aloft for only a few nights: too short for an ambitious experiment,’ the developers explained.
SuperBIT’s final preparations for launch from Timmins Stratospheric Balloon Base Canada, in September 2019
When it launches from New Zealand in April it will be carried by seasonally stable winds, circumnavigate the Earth several times while imaging the sky all night, then using solar panels to recharge its batteries during the day.
With a budget for construction and operation for the first telescope of $5 million (£3.62 million), SuperBIT cost almost 1000 times less than a similar satellite.
Not only are balloons cheaper than rocket fuel, but the ability to return the payload to Earth and relaunch it means that its design has been tweaked and improved over several test flights.
Test images made using the new balloon launched telescope (left) show the stunning Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebular, and right are the same pillars captured by Hubble
Satellites must work first time, so typically have expensive redundancy on board, including back up modules.
They also tend to feature decade-old technology that had to be space-qualified by the previous mission.
Modern digital cameras improve every year – so the development team bought the cutting-edge camera for SuperBIT’s latest test flight a few weeks before launch.
This space telescope will continue to be upgradable, or have new instruments on every future flight. Something only possible with Hubble every few years during the Space Shuttle era.
In the longer term, the Hubble Space Telescope will not be repaired again when it inevitably fails – it was originally expected to last for a decade but thanks to extensive repairs and upgrades, it has been going 30 years.
In recent weeks Hubble stopped working due to a computer anomaly, only coming back online after ‘risky’ remote repair work by the NASA team.
For 20 years after Hubble fails, ESA/NASA missions will enable imaging only at infrared wavelengths or in a single optical band.
By then SuperBIT will be the only facility in the world capable of high-resolution multicolour optical and ultraviolet observations, the team said.
They have already secured funding to design an upgrade for SuperBIT’s mirror, taking it up to 1.5 metres and in future could see it reach two metres.
At 1.5 metres they will be boosting light gathering power tenfold, combined with its wider angle lens and more megapixels, will gather images better than Hubble.
The cheap cost even makes it possible to have a fleet of space telescopes offering time to astronomers around the world.
‘New balloon technology makes visiting space cheap, easy, and environmentally friendly,” said Shaaban.
‘SuperBIT can be continually reconfigured and upgraded, but its first mission will watch the largest particle accelerators in the Universe: collisions between clusters of galaxies.’
The science goal for the 2022 flight is to measure the properties of dark matter particles through these galactic scale collisions.
Although dark matter is invisible, astronomers map the way it bends rays of light, a technique known as gravitational lensing.
SuperBIT will test whether dark matter slows down during collisions.
No particle colliders on Earth can accelerate dark matter, but this is a key signature predicted by theories that might explain recent observations of weirdly behaving muons that may change the ‘basic model’ of the universe.
‘Cavemen could smash rocks together, to see what they’re made of,” added Prof. Richard Massey of Durham University.
‘SuperBIT is looking for the crunch of dark matter. It’s the same experiment, you just need a space telescope to see it.’