AUFORA News Update
Thursday, September 26th, 1996

NASA BALLOON SPARKS UFO REPORTS

from Nando Net (http://www.nando.net)

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (Sep 25, 1996 01:42 a.m. EDT) -- The brilliant ball of light that floated above Albuquerque mesmerized sky watchers and caused a spat of UFO reports.

It was all the chatter on Monday morning's radio commuter shows. One caller speculated it was a "floating jellyfish."

The truth is more interesting.

"Yes, it's one of ours," said Danny Ball, manager of NASA's National Scientific Balloon Facility at the Fort Sumner Airport, about 150 miles east of Albuquerque.

And it's no wonder it was eye-catching. The helium-filled plastic balloon is the largest launched by the facility, measuring about 460 feet in diameter with a capacity of 40 million cubic feet.

Sound big? That's the volume of air in the Houston Astrodome, Ball said.

Scientists brought the balloon down Monday night.

Early Monday, it floated about 125,000 feet up, or roughly 23 miles high, so it looked like a glowing ball in the early morning sunlight.

It was above about "99.9 percent of the atmosphere," which is the whole point of the launch, scientists said.

Carrying a sub-millimeter, infrared telescope for CNES, the French space agency, the balloon was launched early Sunday morning.

The telescope is believed to be the most complex balloon payload ever launched, Ball said.

He said Francois Buisson, the leading astronomer on the project, "has been getting great stuff. They're very excited. This is a big deal."

For more than 24 hours, the telescope has made images of infrared sources of energy in the universe.

Like light, X-rays or radio waves, infrared radiation is energy emitted by some objects in the universe such as young stars, interstellar dust and planets. It is invisible to the human eye but can be detected by special instruments.

The telescope images are beamed by radio to a ground-control room at the Fort Sumner airport where the astronomers record and analyze them.

Ball said he could not say exactly how much the mission cost, but balloon experts say NASA spends about $100,000 for a typical flight.

The Fort Sumner facility is managed for National Aeronautics and Space Administration by the Physical Sciences Laboratory of New Mexico State University at Las Cruces. AUFORA News Update Issue 09.26.96
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