NASA Recovers Solar Telescope, Balloon Stranded in Antarctica for 1 Year

A football-field size balloon with an attached telescope to examine solar flares has been recovered after spending a year on the Antarctic ice, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced in a press release.

The telescope that is designed to examine high-energy particles generated by solar flares spent 12 days floating on spiraling polar vortex 24 miles above the Antarctic continent in January 2016, the release explained on Thursday.

"The scientists did quickly recover the data vaults from the NASA-funded mission, called GRIPS, which is short for Gamma-Ray Imager/Polarimeter for Solar flares," the release stated. "But due to incoming winter weather… they had to leave the remaining instruments on the ice and schedule a recovery effort for the following year."

The Antarctic summer runs October through February.

"Despite sitting on the ice for a year, no snow had made it into the electronics," University of California at Berkeley solar physicist Hazel Bain said.

Over the course of three one-day flights in January to the landing site, about 500 miles away from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists successfully dug out and recovered the instruments balloon, the release noted.