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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."
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!
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."
NASA doesn't leave the balloon material in the wild. The balloons as they fall are tracked and recovered. NASA takes immense precautions when it comes to impacting both human life and wildlife. Please note that I'm being very serious about this, and not joking nor quoting some propaganda - having worked on a ballooning project, I know that the mission priorities come second to both human life and environmental impact. This is extremely frustrating sometimes, especially when you hope to get 40 hours at float, but, it's a good policy.
As an example, have you ever seen a scientific balloon up? Not unless you live in a few select areas of the country - ones with immense wide open spaces where a balloon's descent can be controlled accurately (New Mexico is one of them - Fort Sumner, to be specific). The instrument has to be recovered (you want it to fly again, after all) and so you recover both it and the balloon.
There's no danger to wildlife in this case. That factor has already been considered.
Worst comes to worst, if the balloon gets within any manmade installation (i.e. has any - note *any* potential to do harm) they'd take a chase plane, and radio a command to it to cut the payload.
After all, it's a balloon. It's not like a plane or anything - it just floats. That's beneficial - you don't need any control systems. All you need is a GPS system and a radio. If it starts to head near anything manmade, you cut it. No big loss - just a few hours at float. That's why you wait forever to launch the thing - you wait till the winds are ideal.
Most likely, yes.
Not to offend any Australians. The only main concern is population density.
The ballooners actually have quite a bit of control over the balloon, actually. On the balloon campaign I was on, there was a problem with the first launch - the balloon actually had a leak in it, and so it was rapidly losing helium. Of course, it never could reach float altitude and the only concern then was getting the payload and balloon down without any risk or danger to people/livestock/environment.
It was rather impressive. The NSBF (National Scientific Ballooning Foundation) people are very impressive - very good at their jobs. They cut the payload at 40,000 feet, which was actually quite below what we were hoping to reach before cutting it down, but apparently the estimates for the necessary height for a safe landing were a bit conservative. On its descent, the payload missed power lines by a few feet, missed telephone wires by fewer, and landed about two feet away from a fence, on the only flat spot in the surrounding areas.
Needless to say, we were very, very impressed.
Anyway, the main reason I'm stating this is just to get out of a jam I got in arguing with someone last time - this isn't to say there's anything wrong with Australia - it's just that in this case, you have a large area where you can bring the balloon down safely without having any reasonable risk of danger.
Texas.
...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
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.
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.
According to the real time tracking page at the site, the flight was terminated shortly after launch.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
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...
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
It may have failed, but it looked quite spectacular on the news. They say it doesn't mean and end to the project.
Was the failure due to a NASA mixup over US football stadium units of measurement vs. Aussie rules football stadium units? ;-)
The balloon is only 1% or less full of helium when launched. There's only a tiny bubble of helium in it. The helium expands as the balloon rises into lower density air until it is 100% full at full altitude.
y /h elium/330398.pdf
It's only a drop in the bucket of annual helium production of (1997) some 100,000,000 cubic meters (3.5 billion cubic feet) in the US alone (the US produces the bulk of the world's helium).
See:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodit
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
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 189000/1189148.stm