NASA balloon program ready to launch in New Mexico

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NASA’s annual fall Scientific Balloon Program is due to get underway this week, featuring 24 different scientific payloads across eight separate launches.

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility

Taking place at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Balloon Program window begins on August 10. The program is run by NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility and includes teams of scientists, engineers and students from a host of different nations.

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“Our annual Fort Sumner campaign is always our most ambitious and packed with cutting-edge science developed from teams here in the United States and around the world,” said Debbie Fairbrother, Scientific Balloon Program chief at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

One mission on deck is the Exoplanet Climate Infrared Telescope (EXCITE). The mission features a suborbital astronomical telescope developed to study Jupiter-type exoplanets orbiting other stars. After this engineering test flight, a flight on a long-duration super pressure balloon is planned.

The EXCITE mission team is composed of members from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, Arizona State University, Brown University, Cornell University, Oxford University, University of Rome, StarSpec Technologies, Inc., University of Toronto, and University College London.

The additional core missions set to fly during the launch window include:

  • Gamma-Ray Polarimeter Experiment (GRAPE): Instrument will measure the Crab Nebula to demonstrate imaging and polarisation of gamma-ray bursts.
  • Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) REMOTE: Instruments will address science issues in NASA’s Atmospheric Composition focus area, including providing validations data for NASA satellites.
  • Faint Intergalactic-medium Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2): The mission features an ultraviolet multi-object spectrograph designed to detect faint emissions from the circumgalactic medium of nearby galaxies.
  • High-Altitude Student Platform (HASP): This platform assists in training the next generation of aerospace scientists and engineers. Onboard experiments include an Ozone detection system and an electron spectrometer telescope. A flight test of experimental hardware for larger future experiments will be conducted.
  • Testbed for High-Acuity Imaging and Stable Photometry and Image-Motion Compensation (THAI-SPICE): The goal of this project is to build and demonstrate a fine-pointing system for stratospheric payloads with balloon-borne telescopes.
  • Thermalised Neutron Measurement Experiment (TinMan): This mission features a 60-pound payload designed to address concerns about thermal neutron effects on avionics.

As well as the eight core missions, sixteen smaller payloads - called piggyback missions - will ride along during the launches. One of these missions, ComPair, is a Goddard instrument that will test new technologies for studying gamma rays. 

“Lots of interesting science happens in the energy range that ComPair is designed to study,” said Nicholas Kirschner, a graduate student at George Washington University in Washington and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These gamma rays are hard to capture with existing methods, so we need to create and test new ones. ComPair's flight gets us one step closer to putting a similar detector in space.”

NASA