Status of the STUDIO UV balloon mission and platform

Ground-Based and Airborne Telescopes VIII 2020; Virtual, Online; United States; 14 December 2020 through 22 December 2020; Code 166573.--Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering Volume 11445, 2020, Article number 114451Y.--Full list of authors: Pahler, A.; Ã ngermann, M.; Barnstedt, J.; Bougueroua, S.; Colin, A.; Conti, L.; Diebold, S.; Duffard, R.; Emberger, M.; Hanke, L.; Kalkuhl, C.; Kappelmann, N.; Keilig, T.; Klinkner, S.; Krabbe, A.; Janson, O.; Lengowski, M.; Lockowandt, C.; Maier, P.; Müller, T.; Rauch, T.; Schanz, T.; Stelzer, B.; Taheran, M.; Vaerneus, A.; Werner, K.; Wolf, J.
Stratospheric balloons offer accessible and affordable platforms for observations in atmosphere-constrained wavelength ranges. At the same time, they can serve as an effective step for technology demonstration towards future space applications of instruments and other hardware. The Stratospheric UV Demonstrator of an Imaging Observatory (STUDIO) is a balloon-borne platform and mission carrying an imaging micro-channel plate (MCP) detector on a 0.5 m aperture telescope. STUDIO is currently planned to fly during the summer turnaround conditions over Esrange, Sweden, in the 2022 season. For details on the ultraviolet (UV) detector, see the contribution of Conti et al. to this symposium.1 The scientific goal of the mission is to survey for variable hot compact stars and flaring M-dwarf stars within the galactic plane. At the same time, the mission acts as a demonstrator for a versatile and scalable astronomical balloon platform as well as for the aforementioned MCP instrument. The gondola is designed to allow the use of different instruments or telescopes. Furthermore, it is designed to serve for several, also longer flights, which are envisioned under the European Stratospheric Balloon Observatory (ESBO) initiative. In this paper, we present the design and current status of manufacturing and testing of the STUDIO platform. We furthermore present the current plans for the flight and observations from Esrange. © COPYRIGHT SPIE.
ESBO DS has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 777516. R. Duffard and A. Colin acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía ?SEV-2017-0709).