"Rescuing Dark Matter Data: Balloon-Borne Telescope's Hard Landing Yields Valuable Insights"

A NASA telescope called SuperBIT, which launched on a balloon earlier this year, lost communication and suffered damage upon landing in Argentina. However, the 200 gigabytes of data it had collected, including stunning images of galaxy clusters, were safely copied to SD drives and parachuted to the ground. The telescope's main goal was to map dark matter around galaxy clusters by measuring how celestial objects warp space and time. The successful recovery of the data demonstrates that valuable science data can be salvaged even in worst-case scenarios.