The October meeting of The Phoenix Astronomical Society (TPAS) featured a remarkable guest speaker: Karina Leppik, an astronomer and science communicator whose career has taken her from the frozen heart of Antarctica to the thin, dry air of the stratosphere.
Her talk, “Telescopes in Unusual Places,” was a fascinating journey through some of the most extreme observatories on (and above) our planet.
Life at the South Pole
Karina opened her talk with scenes from her time in Antarctica, describing what it’s really like to live and work in temperatures that can drop below –70 °C.
“Cold feels different in different places,” she explained. “At the South Pole, it’s a dry cold — no humidity, no precipitation. When it’s really cold at the South Pole, there is no wind so your body heat stays with you.”
Even so, the conditions could be brutal. At –40 °C with 40-knot winds, no one would normally go outside. Yet the Antarctic teams did, clearing snow that behaves “like a soft Styrofoam — you just chop it into blocks and toss it aside.” And she would walk the 1km distance from the base to the telescope and back, every day – sometimes a couple of times a day.
Inside, life revolved around the creativity of the approximately 50 people at the station. One place to escape the cold was the greenhouse: the one place with humidity, warmth, and it provided each person with a single small salad each week. “I enjoyed going to the greenhouse to be with the living plants, and sometimes would just go there to read a book,” she said. Off-duty time included workouts, board games like Settlers of Catan, and themed nights celebrating each person’s home country — complete with imaginary barbecues in the Australian outback.
Launching Telescopes into the Polar Sky
The instrument teams Karina worked with now also launch stratospheric astronomy balloons — vast, helium-filled envelopes carrying delicate telescopes into near-space.
These launches take advantage of the circumpolar wind currents that continuously circle Antarctica. “The winds just go around and around and around,” she said, “so the balloons do too.”
Launching from McMurdo Station avoids international airspace restrictions — a major disadvantage over the Arctic, where flights must navigate multiple national zones.
One recent balloon, the GUSTO mission (Galactic / Extragalactic Ultra Long-Duration Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory), completed two and a half loops around the continent before mission control sent the command to release its payload. It parachuted safely onto the ice near Mawson Station, where recovery teams hope to retrieve it this season.
Karina also shared the unforgettable story of the BLAST! experiment — another long-duration balloon project that went awry when a parachute failed to detach, dragging the telescope 200 kilometres across the Antarctic ice.
“The lesson?” she grinned. “Now everyone keeps their hard drives in bright orange boxes, so if the payload gets lost, you can at least find the data.”
Next Stop: The Stratosphere
After her time on the ice, Karina moved higher still — into the stratosphere, working on NASA’s legendary flying telescope, SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy).
SOFIA was a 2.5-metre infrared telescope mounted inside a modified Boeing 747SP that cruised at 12 kilometres altitude, above most of Earth’s water vapour.
She described how engineers redesigned the aircraft to accommodate the telescope, balancing the weight with metal plates in the nose, and isolating vibrations with precision German gyroscopes. The result: a flying observatory capable of sub-arcsecond accuracy — “like focusing on a coin from several kilometres away, while flying at 800 km/h.”
Karina’s role included flight planning, coordinating observation paths where turning the telescope meant turning the entire plane. “Each leg in our flight plan was a science target,” she said. “Over North America, we dodged restricted airspace. From Christchurch, it was perfect — three high-value targets in one smooth arc across the southern sky.”
Christchurch – A Launchpad for Extreme Astronomy
Between 2013 and 2022, Christchurch became SOFIA’s home base for its southern-hemisphere deployments, thanks to its partnership with the US Antarctic Program and NASA. The city offered infrastructure, logistics, and clear access to the Galactic Centre — making it one of the most scientifically productive locations on the planet for airborne astronomy.
Karina now works at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, continuing to share her experiences with visitors and students. Her message resonated strongly with the audience:
“You don’t have to be a scientist to work in science. Every mission depends on engineers, pilots, planners, technicians, and communicators — it takes an entire team to reach the stars.”
