USV completed his first drop test succesfully - 2/28/2006

Sardignia (Italy).- Overcoming a not much cooperating weather, and several cancellations in the past months, finally on Febraury 24th, the USV (Unmanned Space Vehicle) model had acomplished succesfully his first flight being droped over the Tirrenian Sea from a stratospheric balloon.

The launch took place at 8:30 AM local time from the Tortoli/Arbatax airport in Sardinia, after inflation procedures started with the first lights of the day. At left can be seen images of the vehicle being prepared for the flight, provided kindly to StratoCat by the project P.I. Mr. Gennaro Russo. Click on each of them to enlarge.


After take off, the balloon started to ascend during two hours until reach a float altitude near 31 km, starting an eastward flight path over restricted air and sea space, under control of the "Poligono Sperimentale Interforze - Salto di Quirra" wich also take part of the campaign. Then the balloon was commanded to descent to the final height of 20 km from where near 10:00 local time, the USV was released. Reaching 16 km from the sea, started the experimental phase a free fall of 70 seconds were the USV achieved a speed of 1.05 Mach. Once finished the free fall phase the recovery system was activated and a three stage parachute would help the vehicle to reach safelly the sea surface. But when the Italian Military Navy ship "Tavolara" reached the landing zone found that the vehicle was broken.

After careful examination of the flight data, the scientific team realized that things went wrong just after the plane dropped below 10 km in altitude. There, the landing system was activated to slow the craft further and bring it to a gentle splashdown. Unfortunately, the first-stage parachute failed to deploy and Castor accelerated to Mach 1.2 beginning an uncontrolled spinning. The fast spinning of the craft slowed somehow the final velocity but it still hit the sea with such force that it split into three pieces, one of which sank.

According to sources at the Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali (CIRA) wich developed the vehicle, aside the final failure, the mission was very succesfull and a considerable amount of data was obtained by near 500 sensors located in the USV's body.

The launch was initially planned to be acomplished during summer months from the Luigi Broglio stratospheric balloon launch base, in the west side of Sicily, but after several delays mainly related to unsuitable weather conditions, the reversal of wind trajectory from the summer to winter, froced to select another site. The location finally elected was the strip of the small airport of Tortolí/Arbatax in the east shore of the island of Sardegna.

The vehicle technically called FTB1 (Flight Test Bed 1) but baptized "Castor" was developed by Carlo Gavazzi Space on behalf of (CIRA) and with participation of several other Italian firms of the sector.

The USV, without pilot and engine is 9.2 meters long and have a mass of 1,2 tons. It is a true "flying laboratory" wich will help to understand the dynamic behaviour of a reentry body in transonic flight.

For this task, ASI was developed a special kind of gondola called StratoLift to hold not only the model to be dropped but the telemetry and communications equipment, CIRA's avionics. The craft is equiped with self inflatable floats to prevent the sunk of the structure.

The entire project fall under the umbrella of the PRORA-USV (Unmanned Space Vehicles) program. A further step will be the launch in 2010 of a full scale model, by a VEGA launcher from French Guiana.


Notably, this test is not the first: back in 1996 an european project called Atmosferic Reentry Demonstrator was launched too with a balloon and then released in free-fall over the sea and in the start of the 90`s decade another project called FALKE pursued the same objectives.

For more information on the prototype, visit the CIRA's web site at http://www.cira.it/usv/usv.asp.

VASCO 2007 balloon launch campaign - 2/26/2007

Mahé (Seychelles).- The landing of the last balloon still in flight wich occured today near the Antarctic Ocean marked the end of the VASCO-CIRENE campaign 2007 carried out from January in the Seychelles Island.

The campaign -wich included as in 2006 the launch of superpressure balloon as well a less known kind called "aeroclippers"- had as main objective the study of several atmospheric and oceanic proceces in that zone, with special attention to the interaction between the ocean ant the atmosphere in interseasonal time scales. Aside the balloon studies, the oceanographic vessel "Suroit" performed also several studies in the same zone.

The total number of balloon launches were 19. As for the well known superpressure balloons, flying at a regular height of 1200 mts, the best performer attained a lifetime of 33 days traveling near 33.000 kms, and the last balloon in flight acquired a southward trajectory wich drive it directly to the polar vortex.

The other kind of balloon used in the campaign was the less known "Aeroclipper" (picture). These are balloons drifting in the boundary layer winds (at a height of ~50 meters) with a guide rope hanging down to the surface of the sea. They collect sea surface measurements (temperature and salinity) as well as measurements in the surface boundary layer (humidity, temperature, height, relative wind).

The launch operations of superpressure balloon was acomplished using the local aerodrome were one of their hangars was used as integration building and the Aeroclippers were released from the sea shore near Mahé. The original aeroclipper have a tetrahedrical shape but during the last VASCO campaign in 2006, the wind speed was higher than expected inducing mechanical conditions above the envelope design limit and all the AeroClipper flights were shorter than planned. Once studied in laboratory the problem was corrected but due to planning constraint, the development of a new specific balloon with a new material for the AeroClipper was not possible in time for the 2007 campaign so was decided to use commercial balloons of airship type provided by Raven.

The best performance for an Aeroclipper during the campaign was of 31 days.

As occured in the last campaign The launch operations of superpressure balloon was acomplished using the local aerodrome were one of their hangars was used as integration building and the Aeroclippers were released from the sea shore near Mahé.

Details and images of the launch operations can be seen in the LMD web site at http://www.lmd.ens.fr/tromeur/VASCO/Journal_2007.html.

Troubles for NASA on the AURA campaign - 2/23/2007

Kiruna (Sweden) The validation campaign has ended with some troubles. The second flight for the validation campaign of NASA's AURA satellite faced complications on Febraury 7th when after reach float altitude, the balloon burst. The balloon was carrying the JPL's MkIV interferometer devoted to made atmospheric measurements in coincidence with overflights of the AURA satellite over the balloon's flight path. The balloon was launched by the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) from the Swedish base of ESRANGE, near Kiruna. The flight started at 3:13 utc, apparently in normal conditions but upon reaching float near a height of 34 km, at 5:05 UTC, the balloon failed activating the recovery parachute wich helped the payload to reach ground more or less undamaged in a zone located east of Talinnen, in Norrbotten, Sweden.

The recovery helicopter was unable to fly immediatelly due to icing conditions as well the ground-teams were also unable to reach the gondola on snowmobiles because the snow in the zone was too deep. The next day a recovery party finally reached the landing place and found the gondola with several hits as a result of the landing. Nevertheless when the instrument was back in the launch base a more deep examination revealed that the MkIV scanner was broken thus forcing to made some major repairs before to attempt a reflight.

The work started at once and by Febraury 10th, the scanner was fixed. After a few test on Febraury 13th the gondola was ready to be launched again and after waiting some days for the polar vortex return, finally the re-flight took place on Febraury 22th, at 11:37 utc but again the balloon apparently failed going into float altitude and a termination was initiated at once by the burst detector system. The Esrange helicopter recovery crew reported that the payload remained upright after landing, appearing to be in excellent condition and will be recovered. In this this last flight some measurements were obtained during ascent. More information on JPL website.

A succesfull start

The first flight of the campaign started on January 24th at 7:40 utc, until 10:24 utc when the balloon was terminated in a zone north of Valvtrasket Lake, in Norbotten, Sweden.

This first balloon transported a multi-instrumental gondola developed bythe Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) wich contained three instruments devoted to made in-situ measurements of atmospheric constituents: FIRS-2 (Far Infrared Fourier Transform Emission Spectrometer) developed by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, SLS a limb sounder and a remotelly controled photometer devoted to made measurements of ozone levels, both from the JPL.