Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope

At approximately 35 km altitude above sea level, the football-stadium-sized balloon carries SuperBIT (at 3500 lbs) to a suborbital environment above 99.2% of the Earth's atmosphere in order to obtain space-quality imaging.

As a research instrument, SuperBIT's primary science goal is to provide insight into the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters and throughout the large-scale structure of the universe.

This level of precision, coupled with diffraction-limited optics and a large 0.5-degree field-of-view, enables SuperBIT to undertake astronomical surveys at a cadence and quality that rivals the Hubble Space Telescope.

[9] In this sense, one of SuperBIT's over-arching science and technology development goals is to make rapidly developed yet highly capable suborbital astronomical platforms more accessible to the astronomical community at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent space- or satellite-based system of equivalent capability.

For both of these engineering test flights, launch took place from Palestine, Texas and was facilitated by NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.

[6] This was the final test flight necessary to qualify the SuperBIT system for science operations during its upcoming and final long duration flight from Wānaka, New Zealand, the results from which will offer significant contributions to galaxy cluster studies, weak lensing science, and dark matter cosmology.

[15] A small portion of the data from this flight were featured as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for April 17, 2023 [16] Although SuperBIT's primary science goals is centered around weak gravitational lensing and large scale structure, the development of SuperBIT has produced notable contributions in the fields of balloon-borne engineering, measuring the near-ultraviolet to near-infrared of sky background levels at stratospheric altitudes, and techniques for suborbital operations.