A giant balloon shaped like the head of Darth Vader lifts off in Putrajaya, Malaysia on March 17, 2011. (Saeede Khan/AFP/Getty Images)

A hot air balloon ride can be a beautiful experience, both going up in one to see the landscape around you, or watching them rise majestically from the ground.

So why does a hot air balloon float? Archimedes' Principle states when an object is placed in water, if the weight of the object is less than that of the water it would displace, the object will float, according to Weber University. A hot air balloon floats for the same reason. When heated, air molecules expand, making them less dense than the colder air molecules surrounding them. The colder air behaves the same way as water, buoying the warm air filled balloon aloft. Jonathan Erdman, a Weather Channel meteorologist,states the balloon will then rise until the air pressure in the balloon reaches equilibrium with the air pressure of the atmosphere surrounding it.

The first hot-air balloon was pioneered by two brothers, Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier, although they did not understand comparative air density, believing it was the smoke that caused the balloon to rise, and in 1783 the Montgolfiers made a sheep, a rooster and a duck the first to fly in a hot air balloon, according to history.com. The three animals landed safely, and the art of hot air ballooning took flight.

Since then, hot air balloons went on an important role in the military, being used for surveillance and communication in the Civil War and both World Wars, pbs.org reports.

While most hot air ballooning today is for recreation, the balloons are still playing an important part in modern society, such as in the field of weather research. Hot air balloons were used by researchers from the University of Alabama in 2008 to launch debris similar to the type sent aloft by a tornado in order to take Doppler radar readings to improve the accuracy of tornado warnings in the future, according to sciencedaily.com.

An updated version of the hot air balloon might even play an important role in exploring Mars in the future. A type of hot air balloon known as a solar Montgolfiere balloon, in which the air is heated by the sun, could be used to assist spacecraft in landing on the red planet, and can be launched in order to gather large-scale surface images for study, according to NASA.

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