Christopher Walker's team successfully launched the Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory from McMurdo in Antarctica on Dec 8, 2016. (Photo: Brian Duffy and Christopher Walker)
NASA Selects Airborne Observatory for Funding
NASA is funding the $40 Million UA-led GUSTO mission, which will send a balloon-borne telescope to near space to study the gas and dust between the stars, from which all stars and planets originate.
Christopher Walker, a professor of astronomy in the UA's Steward Observatory with joint appointments in the UA's colleges of optical sciences and engineering, is the principal investigator of the Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory, or GUSTO, mission. The mission's science aims at measuring emissions from the interstellar medium.
If we want to understand where we came from, we have to understand the interstellar medium," Walker said, "because 4.6 billion years ago, we were interstellar medium."
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