Highly Precise Pointing Control System on a Balloon-Borne Telescope for Optical Observations of Planets

Abstract

A balloon borne telescope is one of the space observation methods by carrying a telescope to the stratosphere with a huge balloon in order to be free from the atmospheric influences on observations. The authors have been developing a balloon borne telescope system for optical observations of other planets in the solar system. The observation aimed to achieve finer images of the planets than those taken by ground telescopes, which required the balloon borne telescope to hold the target star with subarcsec precision during the exposure of the camera. To meet the requirement, the system is equipped three stage pointing system. This article introduces the overview of the flight campaign and the flight system, and reports the pointing performance verified in ground experiments.