BLAST Off
The view through e ven the best telescopes on Earth is obscured by the atmosphere, and the cost of putting one in orbit is, shall we say, astronomical. How then,can scientists get a better peek at the stars for bargain-basement prices? Easy. Suspend a Chevy-sized instrument from a 33-story balloon, and float it up into the very edge of space. That’s what Mark Devlin and an international team of scientists did in June with the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) that they created.“Balloonbased astronomy offers many of the perks of space-based telescopes at a fraction of the cost,” says Devlin,the Class of 1965 Endowed Term Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, who heads the project.BLAST’s journey carried it from the launch site in Kiruna, Sweden, to Inuvik in the north Canadian tundra. During the five-day flight, 260 detectors harvested photons from far-off regions of the universe. The data “will address some of the most important cosmological and galactic questions regarding the formation and evolution of stars, galaxies and clusters,” Devlin reports.A second and longer data-gathering mission is planned for the end of 2006 .“ It’s rel a tively uncharted territory,” the cosmologist notes.“Not only are we collecting some unique and interesting information about the universe, but w e’re also pioneering technologies that will pave the way for other planned balloon projects.”