You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Observing the universe with super large stratospheric balloons
Nice to see these instruments can be put on balloons. If we need expensive rockets to send instruments to space, the budget limits us to sending only a few instruments. And a few is not enough. There's tons of science waiting to be done. The universe is enormous, so much to discover!
Hopefully the altitude attained by the balloons is enough to use this approach to do many other astrophysics investigations beyond the magnetic field and dust in the galaxy.
It is more than enough. The idea is to reach the point where emission/absorption processes from the Earths atmosphere is minimum. And this is exactly 40 kilometers high. At the end of the day, we have an excellent astrophysics experiment at a very decent price :)
Of course, there is other stuff that is as interesting and for which one needs ground or space satellite and for which there is no way out... But balloons already do something :)