NASA’s New Solar Scope Is Ready For Balloon Flight
NASA and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, or KASI, are getting ready to test a new way to see the Sun, high over the New Mexico desert.
A pearlescent balloon — large enough to hug a football field — is scheduled to take flight no earlier than Aug. 26, 2019, carrying beneath it a solar scope called BITSE. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere, called the corona. Short for Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona, BITSE seeks to explain how the Sun spits out the solar wind.
Music credit: "Gear Wheels" by Fabrice Ravel Chapuis [SACEM] from Killer Tracks
Complete transcript available.
Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.
![Team member Nelson Reginald examines the BITSE instrument in the lab where it was built, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere.Credit: NASA/Joy Ng Team member Nelson Reginald examines the BITSE instrument in the lab where it was built, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere.Credit: NASA/Joy Ng](/static/svs/images/no_preview_web_black.png)
Team member Nelson Reginald examines the BITSE instrument in the lab where it was built, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere.
Credit: NASA/Joy Ng
For More Information
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
-
Scientists
- Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy (NASA/GSFC)
- Nelson Reginald (Catholic University of America)
- Jeff Newmark (NASA/GSFC)
- Qian Gong (NASA/GSFC)
-
Producer
- Joy Ng (USRA)
-
Writer
- Kathalina Tran (SGT)
-
Technical support
- Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Release date
This page was originally published on Friday, August 23, 2019.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:45 PM EDT.