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Failure of a Japanese superpressure balloon during test flight - 8/31/2010

Taiki, Hokkaido.- A probe model of the future long duration superpressure balloon being developed by the Japanese Space Agency (Jaxa) that was launched on August 27 from the Multipurpose Air Park in Taiki, Hokkaido Island, failed to maintain the internal pressure at flight.

The test involved the utilization of a "pumpkin shape" balloon measuring 5000 m3 of volume. It was launched at 5:41 Japan Standard Time and ascending at a mean velocity of 250 meters per minute it reached float altitude of 25.2 km 105 minutes after released. At that point the balloon was located about 90 km east-north-east of the launch base and started to pressurize , but at 7:25 when the internal pressure achieved the 64 Pa level, the film tore at the lower part of the balloon developing a leak that forced to terminate the flight.

Despite the failure, JAXA obtained valuable data of the rupture mechanism to study the reasons why the internal pressure was not maintained and even the balloon failed at a lower pressure than expected. For this purpose the images obtained from an up-looking camera located in the gondola will be a key factor to overcome the problem in future tests.

Concordiasi Antarctic campaign has started - 8/29/2010

McMurdo, Antarctica.- The teams from the balloon division of the French Space Agency (CNES) and the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) part of the l'Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, arrived to the McMurdo station on August 13 in a USAF cargo plane that departed from Christchurch, New Zealand. Their objective is to launch 18 superpressure balloons during September and October, in the context of the CONCORDIASI project, aimed to explore and measure the Antarctic atmosphere.

This will the third time that a French balloon launch team will operate in the white continent. The first one occured under the CITADEL campaign from the Dumont D'urville Station in 1973, and the more recent effort took place in 2005 when several superpressure balloons were launched under the framework of the VORCORE campaign, from the Williams Field airport. Instead returning there, for CONCORDIASI, the main integration facility was established in one of the buildings that form the Albert P. Crary Science and Engineering Center, located in the heart at McMurdo Station. The launch pad will be located close to the laboratory.

Once in McMurdo, the team received the mandatory ice clothing and basic survival training, and after meeting with their main cargo (delivered to McMurdo by ship) started to setup their operations site and commenced with the calibration of the scientific instruments to be launched.

In declarations to the press Didier Renaut, in charge of weather and climate programmes at CNES explained that the balloons, drifting at an altitude of 20 km, will perform several tasks: "...We're looking to improve weather forecasting and to better describe climate in this part of the globe. We're also seeking to use the IASI infrared sounding instrument on the MetOp-A satellite more effectively..."

Obtaining accurate measurements with the infrared spectrometer proves more difficult over Antarctica than anywhere else due to the cold temperatures and the clouds, which attenuate the signal. For this reason, the survey campaign will begin by releasing 600 dropsondes from 12 balloons each carrying a "Driftsonde" gondola , over a period of almost two months to acquire vertical profiles of the troposphere up to altitudes of 10-15 km. Some of the dropsonde releases will be timed to coincide with passes of MetOp-A to help in the validation of IASI's measurements directly.

In a second phase of the programme, the balloons will collect data on temperature, pressure, ozone and aerosols using sensors on their flight trains. These data will help scientists to better understand the dynamic, chemical and microphysical mechanisms underlying the formation of the ozone hole and its big variations from one year to the next in this region of the world. The balloons are expected to stay aloft 45 days average, but some could fly for up to 5 months.

The campaign will count with the participation of CNES, responsible for flight control and data reception at its space centre in Toulouse, while Meteo France will control the dropsonde measurements with the collaboration of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the United States, where ten members of CNES's balloon team will be on hand to accomplish the mission.

The ongoings of the campaign can be followed throught a detailed weblog updated almost daily by members of the team on the ice.

First launch of the year at Taiki - 8/23/2010

Taiki, Hokkaido.- As you may remember in one of our last "tweets", we mentioned that all the missions planned to be carried out during the first balloon launch campaign of the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) in last May were delayed until the second half of the year due to adverse weather.

Well, in early August the second launch window opened at the Aerospace Research Field located in the Multipurpose Air Park in Taiki, Hokkaido Island. At right we can see the image of the first balloon launched there, which measuring 100.000 m3 was sent to the stratosphere on the morning of August 22.

The objective of the mission was to obtain air samples using a cryogenic sampler developed by Tokohu University, that was flown from Japan, Antarctica and Sweden many times in the past. The launch -using the unique "sliding platform" method developed by JAXA- was acomplished at 12:05 Japan standard time and two hours later, after a initial ascent phase the balloon reached float altitude of 34.5 km when was flying over open Ocean 75 km east of Hokkaido shore. After the mission was terminated, the payload hit water under his parachute in a point located 25 km E-SE of the Port of Tokachi, where it was recovered by a vessel.

The air samples were taken both in the ascent and in the controlled descent from 12 different altitudes.

The rest of the campaign -which would endure until middle September- will be devoted to perform a test of a new superpressure balloon, to make ozone and gravity waves measurements and the most important mission of the campaign to launch an improved version of the BOV (Balloon-based Operation Vehicle) used to obtain artificial microgravity for scientific purposes. Alike the previous flights, the upcoming BOV mission would count with the addition of an air-breathing engine called "S-Engine", essential to compensate rapidly increasing air-drag extending the microgravity phase up to 60 seconds of duration.

Stay tuned !

NASA fall balloon campaign at Fort Sumner cancelled - 8/11/2010

Fort Sumner, New Mexico.- The Mishap Investigation Board in charge of the investigation of the accident that occurred during the launch of the Nuclear Compton Telescope in Australia in last April, announced this week to the representatives of the NASA Balloon Program Office in Wallops Island, that their final report would take four or five additional weeks to see the light. The direct consequence of the delay is that the flight prohibition currently established over the program remains and will not allow the realization of the Fall campaign at Fort Sumner airport planned to commence in middle August. The only activity to be carried out there will be some basic maintenance and the integration of one payload called "High Wind" developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research that will flight from Sweden to Canada in 2011.

One of the teams already present since early August at the site was Louisiana's State University HASP project. In a very brief message in their website they informed that "...the September launch of HASP 2010 has been put on hold because of a NASA internal review. New details for HASP 2010 will be posted as soon as we get them...". Unofficially we learned that the flight was delayed to the next year.

The only information that we managed to obtain is the fact that apparently the problem that originated the launch mishap in Australia was related to the device that is mounted in the tip of the crane arm or launch vehicle, which performs the clean separation of the payload from it. Apparently, CSBF had made a deep study on it and will came out with a totally new and improved design "fail-proof". The first units of that new "launch head" are being constructed right now.

Also the consequences of the mishap are being suffered by experimenters that would flight under sponsorship of other agencies as is the case of the light-weight Polarized Gamma-ray Observer (PoGOLite) an experiment designed to measure the polarization of soft gamma rays in the 25 keV-80 keV energy range developed mainly by the Particle and Astroparticle Physics Group of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. The instrument was meant to be launched by the Swedish Space Agency from the base of ESRANGE in a typical "turnaround" flight nearing 24-48 hours, but although the payload is predominantly Swedish-built, some CSBF items were to be used (e.g. flight train and parachute), and these items are now "quarantined" until the publication of the report.

Stay tuned for more information as we get it.

Interesting article on Popular Mechanics - 7/22/2010

The August issue of Popular Mechanics included a nice article on ballooning by Jennifer Bogo entitled "The Race to Dive from 120.000 Feet" which is focused in two of the more recent attempts to beat the four records (height, duration and speed in longest free fall and height for manned balloon) set by Lt. Col. Joseph W.Kittinger during the Excelsior III mission in August 1960: the recent failed attempt of the French parachutist Michel Fournier and the upcoming jump to be carried out by Felix Baumgartner in a still unknowkn date and place.

On regard the Red Bull Stratos effort, the article repeats more or less some of the information already made available by the team and shows in details the capsule and special suit to be used for the mission.

No doubt, the most interesting part of it is concerning the recent failed mission of Michel Fournier whose last attempt was hampered a few months ago when a pressure device activated inside the capsule the pilot's main parachute forcing to cancel the flight when the balloon was half-inflated. The write up tells openly some unknown facts on the mission including the crazy idea to re-use the balloon after inflation: althought common sense and decades of experience tells that once a stratospheric balloon is inflated it's extremelly risky to de-inflate it and packit again for late use, Fournier -having no money for a spare balloon- considered at some point to cut the top of the balloon that was damaged and to reterminate it. With this he would probably loss a million cubic feet of volume but would have enough lift to reach a record breaking altitude. At that point the team of American balloonists supporting Fournier's mission was not willing to send "the man up just to die" and refused to carry on the campaign.

Really a good article to read.

More information:

:: The Race to Dive from 120,000 Feet - Online article

Small balloon launched from Svalbard - 7/1/2010

Longyearbyen, Svalbard.- The most recent and unique balloon mission programmed for this season from the Svalbard Archipelago was carried out by a joint team of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Andoya Rocket Range (ARR) on June 17.

After several delays due to high surface winds, the balloon with a volume of 30.000 cubic meters was hand launched from the airstrip of the Longyearbyen airport at 20:30 utc, and after a nominal ascent of near two hours it achieved succesfully a float altitude of 39.4 km. Then, the balloon started a eastward path crossing the Atlantic Ocean and Greenland and after a flight of near 72 hours the balloon was terminated. 46 minutes after the small payload landed in the southern sector of Ellesmere Island in the Nunavut territory, Canada. A few days after, the landing site was reached by a team from ARR which recovered the payload and transported it to Resolute Bay to send it back to Italy.

The purpose of the flight denominated SURECA (Summer Recovery Campaign) was to test a IRIDIUM based telemetry system called BIT (Bidirectional Iridium Telemetry) and to perform scientific measurements with a piggy-back scientific instrument package called CZT containing a high energy radiation detector based on a Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride sensor made by Istituto Materiali per Elettronica e Magnetismo (IMEM/CNR) from Parma.

More information:

:: News section of ASI web site
:: News section of ARR web site

Online petition for supporting Italian aerospace research - 6/8/2010

As the economic crisis is raging on Europe, some governments are planning funding cutbacks in several fields,including aerospace research. One of these governments is the Italian, who is planning to perform dramatic cuts to several cultural and research institutions, including among others the funding that the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) assigns to the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA) as a contribution to the management, maintenance and updating of the research facilities.

Our regular visitors must know that CIRA is the mastermind -among several other projects- behind the recent success of the second flight of the USV (Unmanned Space Vehicle) an automated flying laboratory created to study the dynamics of flight as a test bed for the development of a future space plane. The latest flight of the model under a stratospheric balloon launched from the Tortoli-Arbatax airport in Sardignia was carried out on past April.

After Berlusconi's government put CIRA in a "useless entities list", a group of concerned citizens are expressing their support with the Centre asking the MIUR not to reduce the funding allocation, both because of the specificity of the Center and to avoid an adverse effect on its development and on the survival of the aerospace research in Italy.

All of you, willing to join their support campaign must go to the website of Petition Online and sign the petition to the Italian Government to drawback their intentions.

Should this no happen, the result would be inevitably the deterioration of the capital already invested (estimated at one billion Euros) in over 25 years of activity for the construction of research facilities that are unique all over the world. In addition, such situation would compromise the leadership role that the Italian Aerospace Research Center plays for Italy within all the international organizations devoted to research and technological development in the field of aeronautics and space.

More information:

:: Petition Online

All NASA balloon operations halted - 6/1/2010

Alice Springs, Australia.- The NASA panel sent to Australia in middle May to investigate on the field the mishap that occured during the launch of the NCT (Nuclear Compton Telescope) which resulted in extensive damage to the payload and to a car stationed in the launch field, completed his work and returned to the United States. The next phase of the investigation will demand at least two or three months of work to complete the report to be submitted to the authorities of the agency.

A first preliminary consequence of the investigation is the final cancellation of the Australian campaign. By the time of this writing all CSBF personel as well the remaining people of the scientific team of the last instrument that waited the campaign resume (HERO telescope) would be back in United States. A second consequence is that the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility is not authorized to launch any other balloon mission in the short term.

NASA balloon program suffered several catastrophic failures in the past, even more spectacular than the recent Australian mishap, but the worldwide coverage of the event, make a big difference. In the past the agency managed to not get any negative publicity and performed investigations internally to correct and improve the processes, but the degree of exposition of the NCT event probably will lead to deeper action.

It's not clear, at this time, how all this will affect the operations, but probably the effects of the flight restriction will have a direct impact in the more immediate campaigns: Palestine (TX) and Sweden in summer, and Fort Sumner (NM) in the fall. Also another enigma is if will be carried out the integration process of the payloads intended to flight in the 2010/2011 Antarctic campaign.

We will try to obtain more information on this. Stay tuned.