This week, near the remote central Aus-tralian town of Alice Springs, a group of NASA scientists hopes to unfurl a new kind of balloon. If all goes well, the balloon's clingfilm-thin material will billow outwards as it is pumped full of helium, stretching until it takes on a lobed, pumpkin-like shape. The craft should then drift upwards and begin its journey around the globe, one of the last test flights in a project that aims to transform the way in which astronomers use balloons. If successful, similar craft could carry telescopes on high-altitude, 100-day missions that would match some of the scientific potential of satellites. The results of the test flight will be keenly watched by astronomers who want to lift their telescopes above the interfering influence of Earth's lower atmosphere, but who lack the funds for satellite launches. "You can do an awful lot in a 100-day balloon flight," says Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has been flying experiments on balloons since the 1950s. "It's like a littk satellite experiment at one-tenth of the cost."
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