![]() ![]() For environmentalists, it’s a “sky island ecosystem” that hosts rare and altitude-sensitive species, including the wekiu bug found nowhere else in the world. “It’s a fairly easy, lightweight solution,” Sirks says.The broad-shouldered summit of Mauna Kea holds many meanings for many people: For astronomers, it’s a high-altitude playground of stars, among the best places on Earth to explore the firmament with minimal atmospheric distortion. Eventually, the researchers plan to make the capsule system available for future balloon missions. Her team is working on insulating the batteries in the capsules, which could enable them to transmit their locations as they descend through the cold atmosphere. The crash-landing underscores the need for contingency plans, Sirks says, especially since NASA plans to execute many more balloon-borne missions. Studying the behavior of starlight from the nebula and other cosmic structures could help researchers learn more about dark matter. SuperBIT captured this image of the Tarantula Nebula, about 160,000 light-years away, while floating at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. Sirks and colleagues are still analyzing those data, which she hopes will help map the distribution of dark matter in the universe. Researchers recovered data from both capsules and, eventually, the telescope’s remains. “We surmise that foam and parachute nylon are intriguing but not tasty,” Sirks and colleagues wrote in the study. Thankfully, the cat was nowhere to be found and had left the capsule unscathed. The second capsule was found nearly 2 km away and a few meters from its signaled location.Ī cougar may have moved the capsule, as a set of tracks was found nearby. A search-and-rescue team, following transmissions from the capsules, found the first one 3.8 km from its predicted landing site. While descending into a rural area in Argentina, the capsules drifted horizontally about 60 kilometers. The team described the new drop capsule system November 15 in Aerospace. ![]() They were also equipped with parachutes - bright orange to aid recovery. Each 1.28-kilogram capsule contained a battery-powered circuit board that stored the data, encased in a foam-wrapped plastic shell sealed in a waterproof chicken roasting bag. ![]() UTC, two small packages containing precious dark matter data separated from SuperBIT. Steven Bentonīy the end of the day, SuperBIT had been destroyed the telescope’s parachute failed to detach upon landing and dragged the craft to pieces. But they became important, she says, “because all the worst-case scenarios came true.” Astrophysicists Ajay Gill and Ellen Sirks (right) pack a drop capsule for the SuperBIT mission. “We sort of envisioned these as a redundant way of backing up the data,” says Sirks, of the University of Sydney in Australia. The team simulated weather conditions to predict where the escape pods would land. Operators decided to terminate the flight early and anticipated a rough landing, so astrophysicist Ellen Sirks and colleagues instructed the aloft apparatus to send its data to Earth via capsules. As SuperBIT made a sixth pass over South America, projections showed the solar-powered telescope heading toward gloomy weather and away from another stretch of land to safely alight upon. Early in the mission, satellite communications failed and the telescope’s operators could not retrieve data wirelessly.
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