Scientific Research With High-altitude Balloons : A Brief Review of Recent Investigations

The following report summarizes recent results of balloon-borne observations separately for the various disciplines: infrared astronomy, ultraviolet astronomy, X-ray astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy, cosmic rays, and atmospheric sciences. Bibliographies of the relevant publications are given for each discipline at the end of the corresponding section. Undoubtedly, the reader will find the great variety of significant research quite impressive. Nevertheless, we cannot hope to cover the field of scientific ballooning completely in this report. We may have overlooked or misrepresented some important investigations, and we wish to apologize for any such errors.