NASA Telescope Revolution: "Sunrise" to Use Jumbo-Jet-Sized Balloon!

During a landmark test, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), together with a team of research partners have successfully launched a solar telescope to an altitude of ...120,000 feet, meaning almost 40.000 meters. The craziest part is for that they used a balloon larger than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Given its main target, the project was named "Sunrise". It involves the biggest names in the area such as: NCAR, NASA, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics, Spain's Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands, and the Swedish Space Corporation.

Michael Kn�lker, director of NCAR's High Altitude Observatory and a principal investigator on the project said that: "This unique research project will enable us to view features of the Sun that we've never seen before. We hope to unlock important mysteries about the Sun's magnetic field structures, which at times can cause electromagnetic storms in our upper atmosphere and may have an impact on Earth's climate."

NCAR stated that: "The ultimate goal of the Sunrise project is to investigate the structure and dynamics of the Sun's magnetic fields. The fields fuel solar activity, including plasma storms that buffet Earth's outer atmosphere and affect sensitive telecommunications and power systems. The fields also cause variations in solar radiation, which may be significant factors in long-term changes in Earth's climate.

The huge project is next scheduled for a multiday flight over the Arctic in the summer of 2009, launching from Kiruna, Sweden. The telescope will be able to capture continuous images for a period of several days to as long as two weeks, possibly orbiting the Arctic. It may be launched later on another long-distance flight over the Arctic or the Antarctic.

Buil-in telescopes will capture features on the solar surface as small as 30 kilometers across (about 19 miles), which is more than double the resolution achieved by any other instrument to date. Threfore, scientists to examine structures on the Sun that are believed to be key to understanding the mechanisms driving solar activity.

According to NCAR, the gigantic balloon was designed to carry "6,000 pounds of equipment, including a 1-meter (39-inch) solar telescope, additional observing instruments, communications equipment, computers and disk drives, solar panels, and roll cages and crush pads to protect the payload on landing. The equipment must be able to withstand dramatic changes in temperature, and the steel and aluminum gondola cannot vibrate in ways that could interfere with the operation of the telescope."

The additional gondola system will carry a polarimetric spectrograph that will measure wavelengths in the Sun's electromagnetic spectrum and enable scientists to make inferences about its magnetic fields. Another instrument, known as an imaging magnetograph, will provide two-dimensional magnetic field maps.