A lively dialogue on the mission, design, and implications of SuperBIT balloon-borne telescope one of the highest resolution telescopes ever made with our guest Barth Netterfield PhD, Professor, DADDAA & Physics at Uni of Toronto and project lead of SuperBIT mission to image weak gravitational lensing, galactic star formation, distribution and quantity of dark matter in galaxy clusters and super exoplanet atmospheres.
The $5M Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) is 1,300X lower than the cost of the $6.5bn Hubble Space Telescope to image visible-to-near-UV (300-900 um) with 0.25-.5 arc second imaging and 50X more sensitive resolution than hubble. With a 0.5 m mirror, wide-field, 1.5m aperture, SuperBIT is equipped a helium balloon and 80kg carbon fiber mount telescope with a 69-megapixel camera with low read noise, high quantum efficiency and very low dark current that is capable of flying 1,000kg science payload at 35km altitude. Toward the end of the Podcast episode, Barth enlightens us about the preliminary plans and implications of GigaBIT, next generation atmospheric telescope focusing on green, blue and UV imaging wavelengths, which is planned to be 4X better than ground telescopes with 3X imaging stability over superbit potential launch in late 2020's
SuperBIT: A low-cost, balloon-borne telescope to rival Hubble
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-superbit-low-cost-balloon-borne-telescope-rival.html
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Romualdez, L. J., et al (2018). Overview, design, and flight results from SuperBIT: A high-resolution, wide-field, visible-to-near-UV balloon-borne astronomical telescope. In L. Simard, L. Simard, C. J. Evans, & H. Takami (Eds.), Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII [107020R] (Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering; Vol. 10702). SPIE. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2307754
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