A gigantic NASA balloon designed to carry science instruments to the edge of space crashed during takeoff from Australia's Alice Springs launch site on Thursday, destroying a multimillion-dollar telescope.
The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT), owned by University of California at Berkeley, was designed to study the polarization of gamma rays and other astrophysical phenomena. It was serving as a test bed for instruments being developed for the Advanced Compton Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2015, according to the project’s website.
NASA is still trying to sort out what happened, but a video taken by an ABC News team shows the balloon's undercarriage coming loose, smashing through a fence and toppling an SUV before landing in pieces on the ground.
"We just barely made it out without getting smashed," a bystander interviewed by ABC said. "It looks like the wind shifted and pushed it further than they expected."
When inflated, the balloon is about the size of a football field and capable of carrying science instruments to an altitude of about 25 miles -- above 99 percent of the atmosphere.
Thursday's launch was the second of three planned for the Alice Springs site this spring. The first mission, which launched on April 15, carried the Tracking and Imaging Gamma Ray Experiment, which searches the galactic center of the sky for gamma ray emissions. The third flight, scheduled for May, will launch a Marshall Space Flight Center X-ray telescope known as HERO, though that could be delayed depending on the results of the accident investigation, said Keith Koehler, a NASA spokesman at Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the balloon program.
See the video from the moment the balloon drags the NCT into a parked car:
Photo credit: NASA
Tags: Current Events, NASA, Space Telescopes, Telescopes
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