A team in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is preparing to fly a balloon-borne science instrument called ComPair, which will test new technologies for detecting gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.

ComPair is slated to fly early in NASA's 2023 fall scientific balloon campaign, which opens on Thursday, Aug. 10, weather permitting.

"Lots of interesting science happens in the energy range that ComPair is designed to study," said Nicholas Kirschner, a graduate student at George Washington University in Washington and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who works on the mission. "These gamma rays are hard to capture with existing methods, so we need to create and test new ones. ComPair's flight gets us one step closer to putting a similar detector in space."

ComPair detects gamma rays with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts. Visible light's energy falls between 2 and 3 electron volts, for comparison.

Supernovae and powerful explosions called gamma-ray bursts shine the brightest in this energy range.

NASA's Scientific Balloon Program will take flight with eight planned launches from the agency's balloon launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, flying scientific experiments to a near-space environment via a football-stadium-sized NASA balloon.

The 2023 fall balloon campaign window opens August 10 and features 24 payloads led by teams of scientists, engineers, and students.

"Our annual Fort Sumner campaign is always our most ambitious and packed with cutting-edge science developed from teams here in the United States and around the world," said Debbie Fairbrother, Scientific Balloon Program chief at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

One mission on deck is the Exoplanet Climate Infrared Telescope (EXCITE). The mission features a suborbital astronomical telescope developed to study Jupiter-type exoplanets orbiting other stars.