The Tarantula Nebula | NASA Stratospheric Balloon-based Astronomy | April 2023

The Tarantula Nebula | NASA Stratospheric Balloon-based Astronomy | April 2023

Tarantula Nebula image from NASA's Balloon-Borne SuperBIT Telescope

NASA's Stratospheric Super Pressure Balloon Science Instrument Platform Launched from New Zealand

The Tarantula Nebula taken by the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT). 

The Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) that launched on a scientific super pressure balloon April 16, 2023, local time from Wānaka, New Zealand, has captured its first research images. These images were captured on a balloon-borne telescope floating at 108,000 feet above Earth’s surface, allowing scientists to view these scientific targets from a balloon platform in a near-space environment.

Image Description: The Tarantula Nebula appears here as a vivid burst of pink, red and gold in the center of the black, star-dusted background of space. The nebula is intensely colored near the center of the image, fading to dusty clouds of dark red and purple toward the edges. The entire nebula has the appearance of a bright cloud of glowing dust. Many stars are visible in the background, including shining through the nebula.

The advantage of balloon-based versus space telescopes is the reduced cost of not having to launch a large telescope on a rocket. A super pressure balloon can circumnavigate the globe for up to 100 days to gather scientific data. The balloon also floats at an altitude above most of the Earth’s atmosphere, making it suitable for many astronomical observations.

The SuperBIT telescope captures images of galaxies in the visible-to-near ultraviolet light spectrum, which is within the Hubble Space Telescope’s capabilities, but with a wider field of view. The goal of the mission is to map dark matter around galaxy clusters by measuring the way these massive objects warp the space around them, also called “weak gravitational lensing.”

The Tarantula Nebula is a large star-forming region of ionized hydrogen gas that lies 161,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and its turbulent clouds of gas and dust appear to swirl between the region’s bright, newly formed stars. The Tarantula Nebula has previously be captured by both the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.

The SuperBIT team is a collaboration among NASA; Durham University, United Kingdom; the University of Toronto, Canada; and Princeton University in New Jersey.

NASA invites the public to follow these missions as they fly on their globetrotting journeys about the Southern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes. A balloon’s flight path is controlled by the wind speed and direction at float altitude. The missions will spend most of their time over water, and for any land crossings, NASA works with the U.S. State Department to coordinate country overflight approvals. Real-time tracking of these flights is publicly available here: 

https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon10/flight728NT.htm

In addition, NASA publicizes balloon launch and tracking information via the web at: www.nasa.gov/balloons 

Learn more about NASA's Scientific Balloon Program:

https://www.nasa.gov/scientificballoons

Credit: NASA/SuperBIT

Release Date: April 20, 2023

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