​@NASA has launched its second super pressure balloon from Wānaka Airport, with Airways New Zealand helping the stadium-sized balloon to climb safely to the edge of space.

It's now heading east across the South Pacific, while the first balloon - launched on 16 April by the @NASAWallops and Airways team - is now on its fourth circumnavigation of the Southern Hemisphere.

The wind-propelled balloons will circumnavigate the globe for as long as possible, which could be up to 100 days, collecting data on @NASAWallops balloon technology and the Southern Hemisphere flight environment.

The balloon launched today is carrying the Extreme Universe Space Observatory 2 (EUSO-2) from the University of Chicago, which will detect ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles from beyond our galaxy as they penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. The origins of these particles are not well understood, so the data collected will help solve this mystery.

On board the first balloon is the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) from Princeton University, which uses a wide field of view to image large galaxy clusters in a near-space environment. By measuring the way these massive objects warp the space around them, also called weak gravitational lensing, it will be able to map the dark matter present in these clusters.

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Video courtesy of @NASAWallops and EUSO-2.

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