Berlin - An automated solar observatory suspended from a helium balloon began Monday a five-day flight around the North Pole to study the sun's strange magnetic fields, German scientists said. The Sunrise, a rig three times as tall as a man, carries the biggest solar telescope ever to leave the surface of the earth, according to the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research.
From 37 kilometres up in the sky, it will map magnetic patterns on the sun's huge surface, detecting invisible shapes as little as 35 kilometres across which cause the sun to darken or lighten and which may affect climate change on earth. They are also linked to sunspots.
The rig, or gondola, and its huge balloon, lifted off from a space science base named Esrange at Kiruna in northen Sweden. The instruments must fly high because of image distortion by turbulence in the lower atmosphere of the Earth.
The Sunrise is to be recovered and re-used for other flights, drifting on the winds that blow around the North Pole.
The German institute, based at Katlenburg-Lindau in northern Germany, is one of seven European Union and US agencies involved.
