Balloon-Borne Telescope

Southwest Research Institute Engineering, 2007-08

Liaison(s): Eliot Young, Mark Bullock
Advisor(s): Patrick Little
Students(s): Alan Kraut (TL), Kevin Swartzlander, Elton Wong, Graham Orr (S), Yusuke Nakaya (EX-S), Tony Wimer (F)

Balloon-borne telescopes represent a way to achieve the quality of imaging of space based telescopes, at a fraction of the cost. However, current solutions for image stability on balloon-borne telescopes are not sufficient for all scientific imaging tasks. This project is a feasibility study on the design of an image stabilization system with a significant increase in performance over any existing system.