New Space and Tech

A Roadmap For Scientific Ballooning 2020-2030

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.IM
October 6, 2022
Filed under , ,
A Roadmap For Scientific Ballooning 2020-2030
This illustration shows a high-altitude balloon ascending into the upper atmosphere. When fully inflated, these balloons are 400 feet (150 meters) wide, or about the size of a football stadium, and reach an altitude of 130,000 feet (24.6 miles or 40 kilometers). Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab/Michael Lentz

From 2018 to 2020, the Scientific Balloon Roadmap Program Analysis Group (Balloon Roadmap PAG) served as an community-based, interdisciplinary forum for soliciting and coordinating community analysis and input in support of the NASA Scientific Balloon Program.

The Balloon Roadmap PAG was tasked with articulating and prioritizing the key science drivers and needed capabilities of the Balloon Program for the next decade. Additionally, the Balloon Roadmap PAG was asked to evaluate the potential for achieving science goals and maturing technologies of the Science Mission Directorate, evaluate the Balloon Program goals towards community outreach, and asses commercial balloon launch opportunities. The culmination of this work has been a written report submitted to the NASA Astrophysics Division Director.

Peter Gorham, James Anderson, Pietro Bernasconi, Supriya Chakrabarti, T. Gregory Guzik, William Jones, Carolyn Kierans, Robyn Millan, Abigail Vieregg, Christopher Walker, Eliot Young

Comments: 95 pages, 69 figures, prepared by the NASA Balloon Program Analysis Group for the NASA Astrophysics Division Director and the 2020 Astrophysics Decadal Survey
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2210.01198 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2210.01198v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.01198
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Submission history
From: Carolyn Kierans
[v1] Mon, 3 Oct 2022 19:23:40 UTC (32,136 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01198

SpaceRef co-founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.