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.

Comments

Saftey & Planning

[ebonum]

I'm a licensed pilot. If I was preparing to fly a glider twice as high as the previous record, I'm not sure I would want anything on my plane not 100% required for my flight. The first concern is weight. The second concern is that I really don't need anything extra to worry about. There are already enough risks involved. I'm not an expert on the flight envelops for gliders at this kind of altitude, but I'm going to guess that the plane will be at the knife edge between stalling and over speed. Gliders at 10,000 feet on a hot summer day get bounced around. A lot. They have shoulder straps for a reason. Storms have been known to remove their wings. Where there is powerful rising air, falling air can't be too far away. At 70, 80, 90,000 feet, a plane with huge, long wings might struggle to deal with the air currents.

An unmanned balloon can hit 90,000 feet and carry a small payload. There are other ways to get these experiments to the edge of space.

Re:Saftey & Planning

[vyvepe]

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.

Re:Saftey & Planning

[ebonum]

Good points. Not all wave flights are so smooth:
http://www.aviationtoday.com/r...
http://www.paul.moggach.yorkso...
No one knows how high these waves travel, much less the edges of the rising, mid and falling air. You can't see rising air. There might be a cloud at the top. If it is there at 90,000 feet, I doubt it will be of much help when you are 20,000 feet below it. Instruments (total energy compensated variometer) can tell you if you are going up or down. Bumping into the edges tells you where the edge is.

Re:Saftey & Planning

[BESTouff]

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).

Re:Where will the speed come from?

[Tx]

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."

Re:The elephant in the room

[techmage]

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.

Re:The only creed I need is

[camperdave]

The edge of space is 328,000 feet (100km). They're only going up 90,000 feet. That's less than a third of the way. "Oh, look! I'm on the second floor. I'm on the edge of space!"