Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall)

FIREBall is a balloon-borne telescope built to detect CGM UV emissions.

The Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall) is a balloon experiment devised to probe redshifted Lyman alpha and metal-line emission from the intergalactic and circumgalactic medium (CGM). Designed and built in collaboration with Caltech and LAM (Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseilles), FIREBall had its first science flight in July 2009 (following an engineering flight in 2007). FIREBall II had its latest flight in the fall of 2018, includes the first UV multi-object slit spectrograph ever flown in space, and is 100 times more sensitive to Lyman alpha emission from the CGM than the original FIREBall experiment. We are continuously working on detector improvement, and the next flight is scheduled for 2022, after the 2020 flight was cancelled due to COVID-19.