The telescope was the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), launched on April 16, 2023, from Wānaka Airport in New Zealand. The telescope was raised to approximately 33,000 metres (108,000 feet) in altitude by NASA’s 532,000-cubic-metre (18.8-million-cubic-foot) balloon and, above circa 99.5 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, it spent over a month circumnavigating the globe and acquiring observations of astronomical objects.