From the ground, it looked like a second moon floating across the sky.
A research balloon the size of a football stadium recently flew over Nunavut and the NWT studying the galaxy, creating a buzz in some of the communities it traveled through.
XL-Calibur, launched from Kiruna, Sweden last week, was built 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 Bose, a senior research engineer at the University of Washington who helped build the telescope it was carrying. (Submitted by Richard Bose)
An XL-Calibur Twitter account shared photos that were captured by people in Norway, Iceland and Nunavut’s Arviat and Iqaluit. The balloon also passed over Yellowknife before WUSTL senior research engineer Richard Bose said the payload landed Monday 80 kilometers from Délı̨nę, NWT.
XL-Calibur was spotted from Arviat on the west side of Hudson Bay!
📷: Borma Jean Kablutsiak pic.twitter.com/Z0qd93BjG4
—@SuperTigerLDB
Bose said NASA decided when the flight should end, a process that involved punching a hole in the balloon so it would drop from a height of 130,000 feet to about 50,000 feet. Then the globe and telescope parted; the latter was brought to the ground with a parachute.
“I just missed a few trees and definitely didn’t land in a lake, which is our biggest concern,” said Bose, who helped build part of the telescope and said the water probably wouldn’t have been kind to the rare and expensive mirrors there are. contains
The XL-Calibur was seen drifting over Iqaluit last Friday. (Karen Pikuyak/CBC)
Jeremy Eggers, a NASA communications officer, told CBC News in an email that the polyethylene film balloon landed nearly 20 kilometers from the payload and that a team was being deployed to collect the debris. three parts
Before any flight ends, Eggers said NASA’s science balloon team conducts a survey to keep the public safe, to minimize environmental impacts and to make sure they can recover as much of the equipment as possible. .
“NASA considers environmental impacts when conducting all of its scientific balloon missions and takes steps to mitigate impacts,” he wrote, adding that the organization worked with Canadian officials to coordinate the flight and landing point of XL-Calibur.
Bose said XL-Calibur’s primary focus is a black hole called Cygnus X1 that is special because it is absorbing gas from a nearby star.
The line on this map shows the flight path of the XL-Calibur from Sweden, over Norway and Iceland and northern Canada. (Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility)
“Black holes are very mysterious objects out there, and of course you can’t really tell what’s going on there because light can’t escape,” he said. But scientists can study things that happen close to them, he said, like a “very intense” X-ray-generating thing near Cygnus X1.
“In the spirit of exploring and understanding what’s going on in our universe, it’s a piece of fundamental research that we’re fortunate to be able to fund.”