Happy New Year, DPers! We wish you all the best for 2013! Also, a little bit of news we’ve been sitting on…. this Christmas, Mark Devlin, the star of our film BLAST! has launched the BLAST telescope from Antarctica for the 3rd time! Check out the video of the launch here as well as the article below for additional information!
The telescope is still in the air! You can track BLAST’s progress here! Follow the scientist’s blog here.
NASA Launches Telescope-Toting Balloon from Antarctica on Christmas
“A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up. Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation’s Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth’s southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures submillimeter light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.
“Christmas launch!” wrote officials with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency’s balloon research program, in a Twitter post yesterday. “BLAST launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.”
This is the fifth and final mission for BLAST, short for the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and mission designers hope it will reveal why so few stars are born in our galaxy.”