COSI collaboration/NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility

The blackness of space was visible above Mount Erebus, on Antarctica's Ross Island, as the COSI mission climbed attached to a helium balloon.

NASA has launched its most ambitious scientific balloon ever. On 28 December at 21:16 London time, technicians inflated and released a 532,000-cubic-metre aerostatic balloon from near McMurdo Station in Antarctica. It is the biggest test yet of a 'super-pressure' design that enables a balloon to stay aloft much longer than a conventional scientific balloon.

If all continues smoothly, experts expect the flight to last for 100 days or longer. The current record for the longest NASA scientific ballooning flight is 55 days, using a traditional balloon. The record for a super-pressure balloon is just a day shorter, at 54 days.

More time aloft equals more science. The new super-pressure balloon is carrying a -ray telescope to hunt for high-energy photons streaming from the cosmos. Known as the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), it can detect where in the sky these rays are coming from, and thus begin to unravel various astronomical mysteries.

COSI is the first science payload designed from scratch to take advantage of NASAs super-pressure technology, says team leader Steven Boggs, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Its predecessors used liquid nitrogen to cool themselves, meaning that the nitrogen ran out in less than 10 days. COSI carries a mechanical cooler that contains nothing to run out of.

COSI collaboration/NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility

The balloon, flanked by a rainbow, as it ascended the Antarctic sky.

The imager stares upward and gathers data through the body of the balloon above it, which is transparent at the -ray energies it studies. It can scan about 50% of the sky overhead during the course of a day.

One of its main goals is to measure polarization in rays streaming from -ray bursts, black holes, pulsars and other cosmic phenomena. The longer it flies, the more data it will be able to gather. The long flight time is key for this study, says Boggs.

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NASA launches next-generation scientific balloon