Doomsday came on May 25 for the payload of a pumpkin-shaped balloon at the edge of space.
The floating gourd — inflated with more than 500,000 cubic meters of helium and large enough to fit 60 Goodyear blimps inside it — traversed the southern hemisphere some five times in 40 days, toting a telescope that could see the unseeable. NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope, or SuperBIT, was on a mission to probe the cosmos for dark matter, the invisible substance thought to scaffold the universe and bind galaxy clusters together (SN: 8/8/22, SN: 6/23/23). By observing how cosmic structures with strong gravity deflect nearby light, SuperBIT could infer
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