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UK Team Misses Balloon Altitude Record, But Beats a Few Others
An anonymous reader writes with this report from Hackaday, which recently covered an attempt at the UK altitude record for an amateur balloon launch. Says the story: "Things don't always go as planned, but the APEX team did manage to beat the several other UK records, including ones for the longest distance and flight duration for a latex balloon." The balloon drifted east from its launching point England, being tracked by Ham radio operators for much of the way, but eventually fell out of range, and is suspected to have ended its flight in Poland or Russia: "The APEX team is offering a reward for finding Alpha, so if you see a small styrofoam box in Eastern Europe, drop the APEX boys a line."
The California Near Space Project broke the altitude record yesterday.
A little device to burst the balloon on command, how difficult can that be?
As it turns out, very difficult. The group I work for, JP Aerospace doesn't burst the balloon directly, but cuts it with a "cutoff" device (which Gordonjcp discusses in another reply). We had a working system up to a few years ago which depended on a particular pyrotechnic formulation. When the company no longer sent the formulation premixed, we spent something like a year attempting to remake that formulation, unfortunately, resulting in an unreliable cutoff. Now, we use a different approach which appears to be more reliable than our original approach.
If I read between the lines, they aren't even 100% sure it actually burst over Eastern Europe. It might as well be somewhere in Siberia or China. Or the Pacific.
It depends on what happened. Maybe they just lost contact with the vehicle at that point (which could be due to burst, batteries running out, or electronics failure). Maybe they have some data indicating the vehicle started to drop.
And it looks like a styrofoam box, and the alphabet used on it is not the cyrillic one, or Chinese, so a lot of people in the path of that balloon might not understand it. In addition, it looks like a piece of packaging material. Good luck finding it back.
You'd be surprised how many people mess with strange things that fall from the sky. :-) If they put contact information on the box and the box falls near a populated area, then there's a good chance someone will find and return it, possibly sans most of the electronics.
The absolute balloon altitude record was set by the BU60-1 balloon from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which reached 53.0 km (173,900 ft) on the morning of 23 May 2002.