Developed by Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency, the 'Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope' (SuperBIT) flies above 99.5 per cent of the Earth’s atmosphere and is carried by a helium balloon the size of a football stadium.
While light from distant galaxies can travel for billions of years to reach our telescopes, once it reaches the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere the view becomes blurred.
Observatories on the ground are built at high altitude sites to overcome some of this, but until now only placing a telescope in space can escape the effects of the atmosphere completely.
The SuperBIT has a 0.5 metre diameter mirror and will be carried to a 40km altitude by a helium balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic metres, about the size of a football stadium.
Its final test flight in 2019 demonstrated that it could be pointed at specific points in the sky with high stability – monitored for more than one hour, the lens deviated by less than one...