From the ground it looked like a second moon floating across the sky.
A research balloon that was the size of a football stadium recently passed over Nunavut and the NWT, studying the galaxy, and caused a stir in some of the communities it traveled through.
XL-Calibur – launched from Kiruna, Sweden, last week – was created by a team of 50 scientists from the US, Japan and Sweden to measure X-rays from black holes and neutron stars.
The trip lasted six days, seven hours and 45 minutes and was a collaboration between NASA, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) and Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
The balloon, which is the size of a football stadium, was photographed at 130,000 feet by Richard Bowes, a senior research engineer at the University of Washington who helped build the telescope it was carrying. (Submitted by Richard Bowes)
A Twitter account for XL-Calibur shared photos taken by people in Norway, Iceland, and Nunavut’s Arviat and Iqaluit. The balloon also passed over Yellowknife before Richard Bowes, a senior research engineer at WUSTL, said the payload landed 80 kilometers from Delaine, NW, on Monday.
XL-Calibur was sighted by Arviat in western Hudson Bay!
📷: Borma Jean Kablutsiak pic.twitter.com/Z0qd93BjG4
—@SuperTigerLDB
Bose said NASA decided when to terminate the flight, a process that involved opening a hole in the balloon so it would drop from an altitude of 130,000 feet to about 50,000 feet. The balloon and telescope then separated, the latter being parachuted to earth.
“We just missed some trees and we definitely didn’t land in a lake, which is our biggest concern,” said Bowes, who helped build part of the telescope and said the water probably wouldn’t be kind to the rare and expensive mirrors , contains.
XL-Calibur was spotted hovering over Iqaluit last Friday. (Karen Pikwyak/CBC)
Jeremy Eggers, a NASA communications officer, told CBC News in an email that the polyethylene foil balloon landed almost 20 kilometers from the payload and that a team was sent to retrieve all three pieces.
Before ending each flight, Eggers said NASA’s balloon science team does research to keep the public safe, minimize environmental impact and make sure they can recover as much of the equipment as possible. .
“NASA considers environmental impacts when conducting all of its balloon science missions and takes actions to mitigate impacts,” he wrote, adding that the agency worked with Canadian officials to coordinate XL-Calibur’s flight and landing site .
Bose said the main focus of XL-Calibur is a black hole called Cygnus X1, which is special because it’s absorbing gas from a nearby star.
The line on this map shows the flight path of XL-Calibur from Sweden, over Norway and Iceland and northern Canada. (Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility)
“Black holes are very mysterious objects, and of course you can’t really tell what’s going on inside them because light can’t escape,” he said. But scientists can study things happening nearby, he said, like something “very intense” generating X-rays near Cygnus X1.
“In the spirit of exploring and understanding what’s going on in our universe, this is part of the fundamental research we’re fortunate to be able to fund.”
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