A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica,
about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up. Launched on Tuesday from the
National Science Foundation's Long Duration Balloon facility on
Earth's southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope
that measures submillimeter light waves from stellar nurseries
in our Milky Way. "Christmas launch!" officials with NASA's
Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency's balloon
research program, wrote in a Twitter update on Tuesday. "BLAST
launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica." This is the
fifth and final mission for BLAST, short for the Balloon-borne
Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and mission designers
hope it will reveal why so few stars are born in our galaxy. On
Dec. 12, BLAST was still in one of the two giant Payload
Assembly Buildings at the Long Duration Balloon facility, a
short distance from the U.S. research center McMurdo Station.
Principal investigator Mark Devlin of the University of
Pennsylvania and a group of graduate s