NASA’s GUSTO Prepares to Map Space Between the Stars


In March 2017, NASA Astrophysics Division selected the Explorer Mission of Opportunity GUSTO (Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory) to measure emissions from the interstellar medium to help scientists determine the life cycle of interstellar gas by surveying a large region of our Milky Way galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud. The GUSTO mission is led by Principal Investigator Christopher Walker from the University of Arizona in Tucson. The team also includes the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which provided the balloon platform to mount the instrumentation, known as the gondola, and the GUSTO project management. The University of Arizona provided the GUSTO telescope and the focal plane instrument, which incorporates detector technologies from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Arizona State University in Tempe, and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.



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