NASA’s BITSE Solar Scope

NASA and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) recently tested a new way to see the Sun, high over the New Mexico desert. A balloon — large enough to hug a football field — took flight in September 2019, carrying beneath it a solar scope called BITSE. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere, called the corona. Short for Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona, BITSE seeks to explain how the Sun spits out the solar wind.