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Students' Experiments To Fly By Glider To the Edge of Space
techmage writes: In 2002 Steve Fossett and Einar Enevoldson set the altitude record for a glider climbing to 42,000 feet in the Perlan I. This year the Perlan II glider will attempt to reach over 90,000 feet. Carried aboard will be be 10 science experiments from students participating in a Teachers in Space contest. Some of these experiments push the boundaries of what can be done at the K-12 level. This news article has a lot more detail on what these kids are sending.
90000 feet doesn't even scratch it. 90000 meters would qualify but 90000 feet? Lame. Students, stop thinking of space and start considering your future seriously: you will probably live a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle if you're reasonably lucky. Some of you may be employed as servants of the Ruling Elite and those will have a chance of a more or less fulfilling life as long as they deem you useful. For the rest of you a bleak life of poverty awaits, cut short by violence, illness or hunger. Class dismissed. Please sign the forms for the eversleep pills those of you already in possess of the parental consent.
They do not want to catch a raising column of hot air (thermal). They want to catch a wave downwind of a mountain. The waves reach considerably higher than the mountain which generates them. Thermals are typically very bumpy. Waves are typically extremely steady. Only their middle part (the rotor) is bumpy but you can avoid that. This should be quite a steady flight.
You implied that you read the wikipedia article; well, it explains the specific weather phenomenon that is to be used to reach above 90k feet.
"Standing waves normally do not extend above the tropopause at temperate latitudes. A strong west wind usually decreases above the tropopause, which has been shown to cap or prevent the upward propagation of standing mountain waves. However, at the outer boundary of the polar vortex, in winter, the stratospheric polar night jet exists. Its wind field can join with the wind field of the polar jet stream. The result is a wind which increases with altitude through the tropopause and upward to 100,000 feet or above. When this conjunction of winds occurs over a barrier mountain, standing mountain waves will propagate through that entire altitude range."
And once that altitude is reached, presumably if the standing mountain wave can get you up to that altitude, it can also keep you up there, if you can ride it. Again, from the wiki page;
"A sailplane can maneuver precisely at very high altitudes to traverse or remain relatively stationary in a desired portion of the wave structure, as the structure is determined in flight."
Oh no... it's the future.
An experienced glider pilot has one more vairometer to use - his own posterior. One can feel speed changes in it :)
Nope. As you say it, own own posterior is an accelerometer, measuring the speed changes, NOT a variiometer, measuring the speed i.e. the position change. You're one derivative wrong.
Piloting without vario is easy to do when you have visual cues around to help assessing your vertical speed, but when higher up in the sky it's really difficult to tell the difference between a steady +1m/s and -1m/s. (World class paraglider competition pilot here, and from the few flights I did in sailplane it's not much different).
The teams selected were not chosen with any race or gender elements in mind, only the science. But we have two teams predominately African American, one Latino team and the other teams are made up of blended groups. Some groups as you have correctly pointed out, have little to no minority presence (we are working on that). For the record, not all groups have posted photos, not were all the photos posted suitable for media use.
There are an almost even number of girls to boys with the girls edging out the boys. We have one team exclusively made up of young ladies. Three student leads and five teachers are women. The teams range from college to kindergarten.
- We dream of the stars. Now let us return to them.