A suite of scientific balloons is going to lift off from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility's field site in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, carrying instruments that will help scientists understand the connection between the Sun and Earth.

The experiment, under NASA’s Scientific Balloon Programme, will kick off an ambitious schedule of 18 flights in 2021. The first campaign of 2021 – with six balloon flights – will lift off from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility’s field site in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, between April-end and mid-June. Among the six balloon flights, four experiments will study different aspects of the Sun’s influence.

They will focus on the stretch of sky 60-300 miles above the surface, where Earth’s upper atmosphere and space meet. The All-Sky Heliospheric Imager is a piggyback payload that will fly along with the Columbia Scientific Balloon Flight (CSBF) Test Flight II no earlier than May 5. It will test the instrument’s capability to reduce stray light and observe the solar wind from here on Earth. Balloon-Based Observations for sunlit Aurora will test a wide-view infrared camera designed to study daytime auroras.

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