NASA is building a balloon as big as a football stadium

[Mike Wehner]

• NASA is sending a new space observatory skyward, but it's going to use a balloon instead of a rocket.
• The observatory ASTHROS will be carried skyward by a balloon stretching 400 feet wide.
• The mission will last up to a month and will be conducted around the South Pole.

Sending an observatory into space is typically handled by a rocket. You cram the spacecraft into a payload bay, fire it into space, and then deploy it in orbit around Earth. For NASA's ASTHROS observatory, the space agency has come up with an entirely different strategy for getting its hardware to the edge of space: a very, very large balloon.

ASTHROS — which is short for Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope for High Spectral Resolution Observations at Submillimeter wavelengths — includes some high-tech instruments for observing space, but first, it has to break free of much of Earth's atmosphere. To make that happen, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is designing a balloon that stretches 400 feet wide, which is roughly the size of a football stadium.

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NASA is building a balloon as big as a football stadium originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 27 Jul 2020 at 19:37:53 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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