NASA Sent a Football-Stadium-Sized Super-Pressure Balloon Around the Globe for 16 Days - Here’s Why

In the wide expanse of space exploration, most people imagine rockets in the sky. But not every stunning NASA mission happens in space. Some unravel just above Earth’s surface. Recently, NASA accomplished something remarkable, not with a spacecraft but with a balloon. A super-pressure balloon the size of a football stadium was launched by NASA from Wānaka, New Zealand, in mid-April, and it has just completed a full journey around the Earth in 16 days, according to NASA.

This balloon, filled with an impressive 18.8 million cubic feet of gas, soared at an altitude of about 21 miles (33 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, making a strategic circumnavigation of the Southern Hemisphere. Gabriel Garde, chief of NASA’s Balloon Program Office at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, remarked, "I am very proud of the mission’s continued success, which is directly reflected in the excellence of our dedicated operations and engineering team…Both the balloon and science instruments have been functioning well during the test flight," stated NASA. The purpose of this remarkable experiment was twofold. First, NASA aimed to test and qualify its super-pressure balloon technology, an intricate design intended to float at a constant altitude, through good and bad weather.

The traditional balloons tend to rise and fall as gas expands or contracts, but not these stellar super-pressure variants. They remain steady, enabling long-duration missions. Intriguingly, this makes them a cost-effective alternative to satellites or rockets, especially for studies that require extended high-altitude observation. Moreover, riding along with the balloon is known as HIWIND (High-altitude Interferometer WIND experiment). Developed by the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, HIWIND measured neutral wind patterns in the upper layer of the atmosphere known as the thermosphere. These measurements are crucial for understanding tiny fluctuations in the ionosphere, which can affect everything, as per NASA.

Garde remarked, "While we have experienced some issues in altitude performance, the balloon structure and its design have performed very well, giving us significant confidence in the viability of the platform to support science…It will still be several days before we overfly land again, and we are looking toward recovering our hardware and assessing the systems." An important point to note is that the mission was initially planned for up to 100 days, according to Live Science.

Experts on the ground detected a small leak, after which the balloon started facing altitude drops. And what happened after that? As a result, NASA made a controlled descent on May 4, bringing the balloon down safely in the Pacific Ocean. Moreover, Garde remarked, "While it would have been preferable to recover the hardware, we were able to ensure all our viable data, both on the science and support sides, were telemetered down." The heavy payload acted like an anchor, making sure it sank to the ocean floor to minimize environmental impact. Sadly, recovery of the hardware was not possible, all critical data had already been transmitted. Despite the premature ending, the mission was labeled a success.