A NASA high-altitude balloon flight earlier this 12 months served as reminder of an ever-important lesson: At all times again up your information.

In April in Wānaka, New Zealand, researchers launched the Tremendous Stress Balloon Imaging Telescope, or SuperBIT, a balloon-based telescope that aimed to assemble information on dark-matter distribution by imaging colliding galaxies. SuperBIT floated on the fringe of the environment for 40 days amassing information earlier than it returned to Earth. Upon touchdown, nevertheless, the balloon was considerably broken. What saved the day was two information restoration methods (whose specs the researchers just lately printed) that earlier within the day had already parachuted all the way down to the Patagonia area of Argentina, rescuing greater than 200 gigabytes of SuperBIT observations.

“It’s like streaming Netflix down from the sting of area.”
—Richard Massey, Durham College, England

“For the entire components on the periodic desk, there’s about six occasions as a lot darkish matter,” says Richard Massey, a professor of physics at Durham College in England. Darkish matter’s solely results on seen matter, famously, can solely be noticed not directly via gravitational results. “It’s a bit like finding out the wind,” Massey explains. “You may’t see the wind when you look outdoors, however you may see leaves blowing round.”

SuperBIT launched from Wānaka, New Zealand, on 16 April 2023.Invoice Rodman/NASA

SuperBIT has skilled its deal with galaxy clusters, the place a whole lot to hundreds of galaxies bunch collectively, typically colliding. “We’re utilizing SuperBIT to map the place the bits fly, so we are able to hopefully determine what this invisible stuff is,” Massey says.

Floor-based telescopes don’t have the decision the researchers wanted to carry out these observations, and present area telescopes—which obtain a lot larger decision by avoiding scattering from the environment—use both too slender or too extensive a discipline of view. Dangling a telescope from a balloon greater than 30 kilometers up provided a super answer, reaching practically the identical decision as an area telescope at a fraction of the price. “It sounds a little bit bit loopy, nevertheless it works remarkably nicely,” says Ellen Sirks, a analysis affiliate on the College of Sydney. She started engaged on SuperBIT as a doctoral scholar of Massey.

Whereas telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb House Telescope price billions of {dollars}, balloon telescopes will be launched “at a college funds,” Sirks says.

Raspberry Pi by Parachute

Balloon-based telescopes current challenges too, resembling dependable information retrieval. Typically, these telescopes beam down information to floor stations or close by satellites. SuperBIT did so with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, however the telescope gathered an excessive amount of information to be transmitted constantly for the whole flight.

“It’s like streaming Netflix down from the sting of area,” says Massey. And not using a secure connection, that “streaming” was interrupted a number of occasions throughout the flight and misplaced about two weeks into the mission. Fortunately, the crew had devised a bodily backup system, supplementing the satellite tv for pc connection and the telescope’s main onerous drives. The information had been copied onto the data-recovery system and dropped from the sky.

“It kind of hearkens again to the Nineteen Sixties and spy satellites,” Massey says. As a substitute of scientific information on SD playing cards, these satellites dropped surveillance footage in movie cassettes.

The information-retrieval system consists of components which can be “comparatively commonplace,” Sirks says. For the electronics, it makes use of a Raspberry Pi compact laptop together with an SD card with 5 terabytes of storage. The storage machine is related to the telescope’s onboard laptop by way of Ethernet to constantly switch the information, and it’s hooked up to the telescope with mechanical pincers utilized by skilled archers and chosen due to their means to face up to excessive pressure. “Typically, the best issues are the perfect options,” Sirk says.

SuperBIT’s Information Restoration System makes use of a Raspberry Pi.Ellen Sirks

When the astronomers are able to launch the system, they ship a message to the Raspberry Pi to start the method. Thirty seconds later, it slides off the telescope and begins the descent. A parachute opens to sluggish the autumn, and the Pi glides all the way down to Earth.

As a result of the balloon-based method is cheaper than launching a telescope into orbit, the researchers had been capable of iterate the design and enhance their data-recovery system. So, whereas the fundamental design has been constant over the data-recovery system’s growth, among the particulars have modified.

For instance, on a 2019 check flight of SuperBIT and its information restoration, Massey and Sirks had been shocked to search out that the Raspberry Pi was overheating—regardless of the frigid surroundings. Within the higher environment, Massey explains, “it’s -60 levels [Celsius], however electronics simply are likely to overheat and reduce out.” The offender was quickly found: Followers are often used to chill down these computer systems, however at that altitude, there’s hardly any air to move the warmth. Within the up to date model of the system, the researchers added a radiator system with a copper tube linking the pc to the encircling surroundings. That approach, the pc might emit warmth out into area and maintain the system cool.

The information-recovery system can be a great answer for flights—like SuperBIT’s—that spend a very long time over our bodies of water, says Andrew Hamilton, the appearing chief of NASA’s Balloon Program. In these flights, there’s a larger likelihood of dropping the telescope within the ocean, to allow them to’t depend on onboard onerous drives. Nonetheless, Hamilton says, the retrieval itself presents challenges: First, you need to get permission from the native air site visitors authority to drop the information capsules. Then, the researchers have to search out the place the capsules have landed.

Earlier than dropping two capsules carrying separate copies of the information, the SuperBIT crew coordinated with the Argentine police, who Massey and Sirks say had been a vital a part of the retrieval. The capsules landed in a distant space with tough terrain, and the researchers knew solely the approximate areas; Sirks had developed software program to calculate the touchdown website primarily based on climate situations, however sturdy crosswinds over the Andes and a defective battery meant they couldn’t observe the touchdown craft exactly.

One of many data-recovery methods was additionally “inspected by the native wildlife” upon its touchdown, Massey says. A cougar discovered the machine and dragged it away from the preliminary website. Fortunately, the system wasn’t broken badly, and the information was protected.

SuperBIT’s flight earlier this 12 months, Hamilton says, was the primary time that the NASA Balloon Program had used this kind of data-recovery system. Now, Hamilton says NASA is wanting into different strategies of performing “information drops,” via applications together with the FLOATing DRAGON Problem, a contest is in search of prototypes of comparable gadgets from college college students.

Sirks and Massey additionally plan to enhance their design for future telescopes by fixing the issue they’d with the system’s battery throughout its descent. And, to maintain the system protected from wildlife after touchdown, Massey has an concept:

“Subsequent time,” he says, ”I suppose we’ll should put one thing that smells a bit dangerous onto it.”