Unfortunately, an exciting NASA mission took a turn for the worse when a telescope launched on a large balloon lost communication with Earth and suffered damage upon landing in Argentina back in June. However, the good news is that the valuable data the telescope had collected was safely salvaged and recovered.
The telescope, known as the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), was designed to provide astronomers with observations of celestial objects. Its main goal was to map dark matter around galaxy clusters by measuring how these celestial objects warp space and time around them.
After taking off from New Zealand in April, the SuperBIT telescope managed to capture stunning images of its galaxy cluster targets in visible to near-ultraviolet light wavelengths. Unfortunately, its planned 100-day mission was shortened to 40 days due to conflicting wind predictions.
Upon its return to Earth, the parachute failed to disconnect from the telescope, resulting in the equipment being dragged over rough terrain for a couple of kilometers. The damage to the telescope left it completely destroyed, and high-bandwidth communications were lost.
Despite this setback, the 200 gigabytes’ worth of data the telescope had collected was successfully copied onto old-fashioned SD drives and parachuted to the ground safely. This feat was made possible by a recovery package developed by scientists from Australia, the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Taiwan. The package consisted of tiny computers with SD cards, a homemade satellite link for communication with the telescope, and parachutes sheathed in waterproof chicken roasting bags.
Retrieving the recovery package from the Argentinian countryside was a mission in itself, but it was ultimately successful. The successful recovery of the data has shown the usefulness and reliability of the recovery package system, with NASA now considering its implementation for other science missions.
This research has been described in a paper published on Tuesday in the journal Aerospace, and serves as a demonstration of the resilience of science data even in a worst-case scenario.