NASA in its recent updates affirmed that the NASA C-130 Hercules aircraft and crew landed safely at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. The NASA C-130 Hercules was on a mission to deliver NASA’s Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO).
You can check our coverage of some of NASA’s upcoming missions and programs here.
The GUSTO mission is part of NASA’s Antarctic long-duration balloon campaign, which is hosted by a United States research station. The GUSTO mission will commence with the launch of a scientific balloon flight in December 2023.
The crew of C-13- first took a halt at Fort Cavazos, Texas on October 17, 2023. The crew loaded the GUSTO observatory and the instrumentation team from there. As of now, the C-130 crew has completed a journey of about 26,400-nautical-mile trip. The aircraft also took a halt in Travis Air Force Base (AFB), California; Hickman AFB, Hawaii; Pago Pago, American Samoa; and Christchurch, New Zealand for aircraft services and crew rest purposes.
The GUSTO mission: The GUSTO mission is a high-altitude balloon mission with the job of carrying an infrared telescope to measure fine-structure line emission from the interstellar medium. It is part of NASA’s Explorers Program. The telescope consists of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen emission line detectors.
Mission objective: GUSTO will present the first complete spectroscopic study of all phases of the stellar life cycle. This includes a journey from the formation of molecular clouds to interstellar gas clouds. The mission will enable researchers to figure out the composition, energetics, and dynamics of the interstellar medium.
