Curious readers contacted Bladet Vesterålen on Tuesday morning after spotting the whitish balloon high in the sky.
In the Stokmarknes airport tower, they were aware of the balloon’s presence, but explained that they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Oslo Airport communications manager Joachim Andersen later said that Avinor did not know what type of balloon it was, but assured that it was not obstructing air traffic in any way.
Vèrvarslinga in Tromsø was better informed and asked us to check out the Esrange space center in Kiruna.
Here we can see what we see is the PoGo+ space telescope, which will drift with stratospheric winds at an altitude of 40 kilometers until reaching Victoria Island, in northern Canada. The shipment was scheduled for the weekend, but was postponed several times due to weather conditions, until Tuesday at six in the morning.
– After a four-day flight, it will land in Canada, says Mattias Abrahamsson of the Esrange Space Center in an email to Folkebladet Tuesday.
The space telescope was developed in Sweden and will be measuring high energy light from the Crab Pulsar6,500 light years from Earth.
The balloon is also twice the size of the Stockholm Globe, which measures 110 meters in diameter. Inform even Swedish radio that the material is as thin as the plastic film we know in the kitchen.
And the telescope weighs two tons. So let’s hope it continues to fly.
Want to follow the journey: Check here!
Learn more about the Crab Nebula and the pulsar at snl.no.
The researchers have, according to Wikipedia calculated that the density of the Crab Pulsar is so great that a single piece the size of a pinhead weighs a million tons
