On December 1, as part of NASA's annual Antarctic Long Duration Balloon Campaign, teams of NASA scientists and engineers at McMurdo Station will launch three giant, helium-filled balloons into the Earth's upper stratosphere.
Despite all the snow and ice, it's actually the beginning of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, which means nearly constant daylight in Antarctica - perfect for solar-powered balloon payloads.
The stratosphere, the layer of Earth's atmosphere from about 20,000 to 160,000 miles above the ground, is a great place for this kind of astronomy.
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