NASA is preparing to start an experiment named GUSTO — short for Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory — to assemble data that might be used to create a 3D map of a portion of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The GUSTO experiment involves a telescope that may float 120,000 feet over Antarctica on a high-altitude balloon for not less than 55 days, absorbing high-frequency radio waves percolating through the cosmic interstellar medium — a term that refers back to the gases, dust, radiation, and other materials that make up the space between stars. NASA has a fun guide to its scientific balloons that explains the zero-pressure and super-pressure balloons it uses for missions like this.
GUSTO will search for signals of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen within the interstellar medium, looking for hints about how stars and planets form — specifically, what makes space particles come together to form the molecular clouds that precede star formation. The balloon will launch from the Antarctic McMurdo Station “no sooner than December 21,” based on NASA.
The investigative lead for the GUSTO project, Chris Walker of the University of Arizona, says GUSTO is uniquely suited to the duty of picking up the terahertz frequencies that the particles transmit. “We principally have this radio system that we built that we will turn the knob and tune to the frequency of those lines,” he said in NASA’s announcement. “If we hear something, we realize it’s them. We realize it’s those atoms and molecules.”
NASA says the mission will even “reveal the 3D structure of the Large Magellanic Cloud,” which is a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way that’s visible with the naked eye from parts of the Earth’s southern hemisphere. The telescope will fly within the South Pole’s atmospheric anticyclone, which is able to guide it in circles across the pole throughout the mission.
GUSTO isn’t the one balloon-based science instrument NASA uses. The agency has been using balloons to send up payloads, sometimes weighing hundreds of kilos, for over 30 years. This particular mission is the primary of the NASA Explorers Program, NASA representative Elizabeth Landau tells in an email. Explorers exists to “provide frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations from space utilizing progressive, streamlined and efficient management approaches inside the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas,” based on NASA.