Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center have earned a prestigious honor — the Hands-On Project Experience (HOPE) Training Opportunity award — that promotes achievement among America’s newest ranks of space scientists and engineers. The project, “High Energy Replicated Optics to Explore the Sun” (HEROES), is a scientific balloon built with the capability of soaring to an altitude of about 25 miles. At that distance into the Earth’s stratosphere, HEROES will study solar flares with its x-ray telescope when the sun is shining, and then look at the stars at night.  “HEROES will provide the most sensitive hard X-ray observations of the sun captured to date, and will pave the way for this technology to be used on a future satellite mission,” said Steven Christe of the Goddard Center.  NASA’s HOPE awards allow NASA scientists with limited flight-project experience to run with a mission from concept to launch and then through post-flight analysis.