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NASA Launches Largest Single-Cell Balloon
hohosforbreakfast writes "According to CNN, NASA launched the largest single-cell, fully-sealed balloon ever from Australia. This thing is supposed to be as large as a football (American) stadium once it's fully inflated, and flies 20 miles high. It'll circumnavigate the globe and then be landed by remote control in Australia. It looks like this flight is a proof-of-concept, but more flights, lasting 100 days each, are planned. Looks like an interesting alternative to satellites for certain observations. The official site is here."
This may be wonderful for research, but it could be deadly for marine life.
Already, many forms of animal life in the ocean suffer from contact with man-made non-biodegradable membranes (e.g. baloons). Can we in good conscience send even more of these deadly devices into the wild? I'm concerned that the sheer size of these balloons has the potential to negatively impact many many animals - especially if they are deployed in number.
I don't wish to give more importance to this issue than it warrants, but I a believe that consequences to marine life should've been more carefully considered.
- qpt
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Domine Deus, creator coeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram.
I just gotta wonder where you get that much helium from. With that much helium needed, they must've needed to create an entire facility just to produce it. Imagine the power requirements to do something like that!
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That thing could probably keep your voice sounding funny for weeks, as long as you breathe some oxygen every now and then.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Seriously if it's remote control, could they actually get in touch with it anywhere on it's global trip if it happens to go wrong? I know they could keep track of it using the existing radar network and fit a standard aviation transdator and even GPS system on it, but I don't see how they could actually transmit signals from the ground to the thing to control it...
Dave
Remember the article last week about the glider/rocket that would refuel? I'm glad the phbs are doing something constructive. What would really be of interest is if you could launch something, say construction material, into low earth orbit, and have a teather shot into low earth orbit, where a passing shuttle could pick the junk up, saving fuel/payload area for more mission crit stuff.
I wonder what the lift capacity wiuld be? Cost per baloon? Its gotta be less than a Proton!
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
The website says the flight has been terminated.
February 24, 2001
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- A giant balloon, which scientists hope will usher in a new age of near space research by riding on the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, took off Sunday after a two-month delay.
"Everybody's a bit relieved," said Garry Woods, the acting launch station director.
Especially relieved was the crew of technicians, 400 strong, who could finally relax.
"We had quite a time of it," said Binky, the team director. "There was a lot of controversy at first, as to what shape the giant balloon would be in. Garry was originally inclined to go with a weiner dog, because he thought it would be most aerodynamic. But we managed to talk him out of. He just didn't understand at first that that particular balloon animal simply didn't scale well. Giggles was the one that had the bright idea of suggesting the ellipse shape, which everyone seemed to like."
Before the clowns finally hopped into their tiny car the launch site, the were nice enough to stop to answer a few questions. Asked what was the hardest part of the process, a short, green wigged clown smoking a cigarette stated simply: "blowing the goddamn thing up. I need a beer."
This is the biggest UFO ever??
Hopefully not.
The last thing we need is some punk aliens popping our US-football-field-sized balloons and allowing them to fall to Earth.
Of course, you know what would happen then. All the huge balloons from all the other galaxies would fly to us in mourning of the death of ours. Hmm, a scary thought indeed.
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Hmmm, that would make its diameter more than 100 feet shorter than an American football field. Not exactly the "size of a domed football stadium." Arena football perhaps?
sorry about posting this to the wrong place. I don't know what happened.
Anna Nicole Smith would beat it hands down (and shoulders back) if they were in the same category.
"Ask me about Loom"
...Must come down. And it already has. I just heard on the evening news that it was brought down by remote control after it developed a leak.
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
I thought from reading the title that this was a football stadium sized, balloon shaped single-cell organism... I guess there is more than one type of cell.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Yah. It's a really sad thing to hear, but this is the way balloon experiments go sometimes. It's also not a big concern, as well, since so long as you don't lose the payload, it's easy to just launch another balloon. Of course, the cost is upsetting, but it's acceptable in proof-of-concept flights.
Best of luck to the team - I hope their rapid "up-down" flight goes as good as ours did! Hope the payload's okay - and good luck on the next flight.
(Oh, and don't doubt that some of the members might be reading Slashdot even as this happens. Considering all you can really do sometimes is wait for approval, etc., there really isn't anything else to do.)
These balloons carry multi-million dollar payloads of scientific instruments. Loosing one in the water would be a huge deal, and would be avoided at all costs. There are generally not that many flights per year, so you are completely off base.
As for them coming down on your house, that isn't an issue for these ULDB flights which will go around the polar regions. But for shorter flights, which go out of the southwest (and Canada), it is a real concern during cutdown. Generally it comes down to a fight between NASA voting for safety and the scientists who built the instruments voting to risk it for more data.
Another tidbit: there was a malfunction with a payload called ISOMAX last year. Generally, the payload is cut away from the balloon and it has a parachute to bring it down. The parachute is cut away once the payload is on the ground to prevent it from being dragged, etc... Unfortunately, there was a vessel failure and loss of GPS tracking, and the parachute was cut while the payload was still X thousand feet in the air and the whole thing went splat out in Manitoba. In NASA's book this qualified as a the same level incident as the shuttle explosion. With the splat went many tens of man-years of work and several million dollars.
If its a single cell the size of a football stadium, how big is the nucleus?
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This balloon is a pretty poor alternative for most applications that satellites can do.
Weather Observation Firstly to view a wide area the vechicle needs to be high. This balloon would not travel high enough to view a decent area
SpyingWhat good is a balloon that goes where ever it pleases and has a radar signature the size of a concrete building
Communications Again no point- The balloon's direction can't be controled, so its no good for a relay node.
Space observationThe platform is too unstable, since it still flies in the albeit thin atmosphere. You would need some pretty snazy gyroscopes to stabilise any sort of space monitoring equipment.
Perhaps the one thing this device is good for is environmental monitoring in the stratosphere
There's never really a 'fight': NSBF always wins - they really, truly decide when to cut the experiment, not the scientists. The only time the scientists are involved is if it's a subjective-type thing, as in "well, if we allow a few more hours, it might not be possible to guarantee a safe touchdown" - safe, meaning to the payload, not to people. Balloons can't - as in, NSBF won't let them - fly near an area where, if the payload drifted to the ground, it would have a chance of hitting someone, or if the payload fell straight down, it would have a chance of hitting someone.
The balloon isn't an alternative to commercial satellites - it's an alternative to scientific satellites.
It's cheap and effectively gets you out of the atmosphere. That's all you need for scientific experiments.
Plenty of science has actually already been done on balloons, and plenty of traditional science is migrating to balloons because of the cost advantage. Telescopes, for instance, are excellent candidates for balloon flights, if you can work out a few kinks here and there (pointing). The main disadvantage had been the float time - measured in hours previously. The ULDB will eliminate that disadvantage, and hopefully, ULDBs will start replacing many satellite missions which could have functioned fine on balloons.
Everyone knows NASA is just full of hot air.
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this is an unmanned balloon. It is far easier to make one of these work than a manned one, which requires all sorts of complicated (and heavy) systems.
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According to the real time tracking page at the site, the flight was terminated shortly after launch.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I sure would hate to be a passenger on a jet that slammed into one of these !
The last thing we need is some punk aliens popping our US-football-field-sized balloons and allowing them to fall to Earth.
All Your Balloons Are Belong To Us!
Gotta stop reading Slashdot while drunk at three in the morning... Brain to body.... Come in body... Only read Slashdot at work so you can get paid for doing it... Brain out...
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It may have failed, but it looked quite spectacular on the news. They say it doesn't mean and end to the project.
I think they might have perhaps identified it before lift-off?? (DUH!)
It was just on the news in Aus. tonight. There was a problem of some kind and it fell from the sky like the proverbial stone. Apparently the experiment it was carrying survived the crash though.
Dave
According to the new here (Darwin, Aus)
It came down 200Km later
Was the failure due to a NASA mixup over US football stadium units of measurement vs. Aussie rules football stadium units? ;-)
i love how the football field (and the related stadium) has become a standard of measurement in america. "the meteor crater could fit 27 football fields on it's bottom", "the kitty hawk flew just about the length of a football field", "the missile has enough accuracy to hit a football field after being launched 5000 miles away", etc. etc.
what ever happened to feet (or meters for that matter)? not sensationalist enough...
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in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Well, one application could be to test the truth in this...
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 189000/1189148.stm
...biggest pin, and create the worlds largest pop.
What's the big deal? 100 days? Jules Verne has already proven that it can be done in 80. Unless they chop down the flight time I won't be impressed.
the SR71 flew too fast.. so tehy need something slower to do their intrusive civil rights breaking spying on americans
Another example of balloon (in)stability can be found at http://balloons.aero.und.edu/habp/project_13/ I'm part of this balloon group, with our goal being inexpensive proof of concept type flights. (We are hoping to send a Tiqit matchbox computer up soon, although hard drives don't like going above 20k feet.)