NASA’s EXCITE mission prepared for scientific balloon flight

Scientists and engineers are able to fly an infrared mission known as EXCITE (EXoplanet Local weather Infrared TElescope) to the sting of space.

EXCITE is designed to check atmospheres round exoplanets, or worlds past our solar system, throughout circumpolar long-duration scientific balloon flights. However first, it should full a test flight throughout NASA’s fall 2024 scientific ballooning campaign from Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

“EXCITE can provide us a three-dimensional image of a planet’s ambiance and temperature by accumulating knowledge the entire time the world orbits its star,” mentioned Peter Nagler, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Solely a handful of a majority of these measurements have been executed earlier than. They require a really secure telescope able to trace a planet for a number of days at a time.”

EXCITE will examine scorching Jupiters, large gasoline exoplanets that full an orbit as soon as each one to 2 days and have temperatures within the 1000’s of levels. The worlds are tidally locked, which implies the identical aspect all the time faces the star.

The telescope will observe how warmth is distributed throughout the planet, from the scalding hemisphere going through the star to the comparatively cooler nightside.

It’s going to additionally decide how molecules in a world’s ambiance soak up and emit gentle over your entire orbit, a course of known as phase-resolved spectroscopy. Not solely can this knowledge reveal the presence of compounds—like water, methane, carbon dioxide, and others—but additionally how they flow into globally because the planet orbits its star.

NASA’s Hubble, James Webb, and retired Spitzer space telescopes have collected a handful of those measurements between them.

In 2014, for instance, Hubble and Spitzer noticed an exoplanet known as WASP-43 b. To gather knowledge over the world’s 22-hour day, scientists wanted 60 hours of Hubble time and 46 hours from Spitzer. Useful resource-intensive research like this on space-based observatories are troublesome. Time is a restricted useful resource, and research should compete with tons of of different requests for that point.

“Throughout its first science flight, EXCITE goals to fly for over a dozen days from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility’s web site in Antarctica,” mentioned Kyle Helson, an EXCITE workforce member and a analysis scientist on the College of Maryland, Baltimore County and NASA Goddard.

“And on the pole, the celebrities we’ll examine do not set, so our observations will not be interrupted. We hope that the mission will successfully double the variety of phase-resolved spectra accessible to the science group.”

EXCITE will fly to about 132,000 ft (40 kilometers) through a scientific balloon crammed with helium. That takes it above 99.5% of Earth’s ambiance. At that altitude, the telescope will be capable of observe a number of infrared wavelengths with little interference.

“The telescope collects the infrared gentle and beams it into the spectrometer, the place it form of goes by means of a little bit impediment course,” mentioned Lee Bernard, an EXCITE workforce member and a graduate analysis assistant at Arizona State College in Tempe.

“It bounces off mirrors and thru a prism earlier than reaching the detector. All the pieces have to be aligned very exactly—just some millimeters off middle and the sunshine will not make it.”

The spectrometer rests inside a vessel known as a cryostat located behind the telescope. The cryostat cools the spectrometer’s detector—as soon as a flight candidate from Webb’sNIRSpec (Near InfraRed Spectrograph)— to about 350 levels beneath zero Fahrenheit (minus 210 levels Celsius) so it may possibly measure tiny depth adjustments within the infrared gentle.

The complete telescope and cryostat meeting rests in a rowboat-shaped base the place it may possibly rotate alongside three axes to take care of secure pointing right down to 50 milliarcseconds. That is like holding a gentle gaze on a U.S. quarter coin from 65 miles away.

“A number of totally different establishments contributed to EXCITE’s subsystems,” mentioned Tim Rehm, an EXCITE workforce member and a graduate analysis assistant at Brown College in Windfall, Rhode Island. “It is nice to see all of them assembled and dealing collectively. We’re excited to do that check flight, and we’re trying ahead to all the long run science flights we hope to have.”

The EXCITE instrument was primarily constructed by NASA Goddard, Brown, Arizona State College, and StarSpec Applied sciences in Ontario, with extra help from collaborators within the U.S., Canada, Italy, and the UK.

NASA’s scientific balloons provide frequent, low-cost entry to near-space to conduct scientific investigations and expertise maturation in fields reminiscent of astrophysics, heliophysics, and atmospheric analysis, in addition to coaching for the subsequent technology of leaders in engineering and science.