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The Surprising History of Scientific Ballooning in 11 Missions
It started with farm animals—now it's revealing secrets of the cosmos
1898: French meteorologist Léon Teisserenc de Bort wanted to know how air temperatures vary at different elevations from the Earth, so he loaded an unpiloted balloon made of paper and silk with temperature-reading devices and dispatched it into the atmosphere. 1962: A Navy astronomer and an Air Force captain climbed into a small steel capsule attached to a 300-foot-tall mylar balloon, aiming to study the cosmos with a special stabilizing telescope and other custom instruments. At such a high altitude, the atmospheric absorption of microwaves falls to a minimum, giving scientists a clearer picture of structures that predate the first star or galaxy in the universe.
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