The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) has twin microwave telescopes that are flown on a NASA scientific balloon. The mission floats to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to find evidence to support the theory that our universe expanded by a trillion trillion times immediately following the big bang. This rapid inflation would have shaken the fabric of space-time, generating ripples called gravitational waves. These waves, in turn, should have produced detectable distortions in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the earliest light in the universe lengthened into microwaves today by cosmic expansion.