Discovery SCIENCE Channel to air documentary about scientific ballooning (10/31/2006)

The scientific channel SCIENCE wich belongs to the DISCOVERY network will transmit a special production about the space research through ballooning.

Produced by Bill Rodman this documentary provides a look at the history of scientific ballooning, and features NASA's Balloon Program Office and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility. Bill took part in many balloon campaigns and obtained some spectacular footage from Sweden, Antarctica, Australia, New Mexico, and Texas.

The show will be aired as a world premiere on November 7th, 10 PM (EST) and will be repeated on Nov 08 (01:00 am, 05:00 am, 11:00 am, 03:00 pm), Nov 11 (10:00 pm), Nov 12 (01:00 am, 05:00 am and 06:00 pm).

More information on the SCIENCE channel web site

Latest launches from Japan (10/25/2006)

Sanriku (Japan).- In the frame of the autumn balloon launches campaign carried out by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) from the Sanriku Balloon Center between past August and September, were launched several balloons.

First on August 30th, was launched a 200.000 m3 volume balloon to transport a experiment called "Solar sail" wich is a future special kind of spacecraft with a propulsion system wich uses large membrane mirrors instead a rocket engine. It is pushed through space by light particles from the Sun reflecting off its giant sails. During the flight was achieved the worldwide first quasi-static development of a membrane wich will form in the future the solar sail structure with the world's largest membrane size ever using a balloon. The flight was succesfull and the membrane was developed as expected. The payload then was ejected and retrieved by a helicopter from the sea. At left can be seen one image of the flight.

Then on September 13th, was launched a balloon model BVT60-2 with a volume of 60.000 m3 fabricated from ultra thin material, aimed to break the world height record already stablished by JAXA 4 years before. After a nominal launch and when the balloon was ascending at 15.6 km, the balloon failed due to unknown reasons. No aditional information was published on the nature of the failure wich prevented the balloon to reach the proposed height of 53 km.

Aditionally were launched several other balloons, but really it' hard to find references about the kind of experiments done and the exact dates.

Nobel Prize for two scientists who studied the cosmic background radiation (10/4/2006)

Stockholm (Sweden) The 100th Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded today to John C. Mather (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) and George Smoot (University of California-Berkeley) "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation" thus: recording faint echoes of the birth of the universe. Their precise, satellite measurements of the cosmic background radiation, remnants of the sea of light emitted by the new universe, have confirmed fundamental predictions arising from the "Big Bang" theory, leading to its further acceptance as the standard model of cosmology.

The possibility that the universe began in an explosive burst was first seriously suggested in the 1920's, and in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson realized that microwave background radiation flooding into their radio receivers was indeed such a signature of the Big Bang but was not until 1989, that NASA's COBE satellite was launched under John Mather's leadership to study the cosmic microwave background radiation from orbit. Within minutes of starting its recordings, it confirmed that this diffuse radiation displayed precisely the expected frequency-wavelength relationships; the perfect 'blackbody' spectrum predicted to result from first light in the universe. In subsequent measurements, detectors on the COBE satellite under the direction of George Smoot were able to measure minute variations, or 'anisotropies', in the background radiation which are the faint whispers left behind by developing clusters in the expanding universe. Such traces of the earliest clumps of matter, which later went on to form large scale objects, such as galaxies and galactic clusters, were another key prediction of Big Bang theory.

But ¿in wich way is all this related to scientific ballooning?. The first investigations of Smoot in the area before the COBE's launch where done mainly using rather complex detector devices flown on stratospheric balloons. For instance one of these flights was achieved here in southamerica at the INPE's facility in Cachoeira Paulista (see picture at right) in 1982. After a succesful flight the payload was thinked lost in the dense brazilian forest, but surpringsly two years after, a poacher told fellow patrons at a bar about a strange object he had found in the jungle, and the INPE team was able to recover the instruments and data. More insights on the former balloon projects adventures can be found in an old interview made to Smoot in 1994 by the OMNI Magazine, when was published his excellent book "Wrinkles in Time".

More information about the Smoot's Group research can be seen at http://aether.lbl.gov/index.html.

Succesful end for the driftsonde balloon launch campaign from Zinder (4/10/2006)

Zinder, (Niger).- The superpressure balloon launch campaign from the airport of Zinder, was finally completed. From their beginning on August 28th, 8 superpressure balloons with a diameter of 12 meters have been sent aloft, flying at a constant altitude of 20 km and with durations ranging from one to nineteen days. The biggest duration was achieved by the last balloon wich was launched on September 15th and landed a few days ago on October 4th while heading west to Southamerica. The balloon was caught by the turn-around wind period while in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and thus made circles several days in the middle of the ocean before return to his nominal route as can be seen clicking here.

This campaign was part of the much wider AMMA effort and was carried out by the same team of french scientists from the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique and technicians of the CNES's balloons division whom conducted the last year the VORCORE campaign from Antarctica together with a team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) from United States, whom developed a new kind of sounding balloon payload called "Driftsonde".

More on the driftsonde system

With several improvements in the communications side -using a Iridium two way connection- the balloons used in the campaign, transported a new payload called "driftsonde" wich was developped by the NCAR, and is able to launch small radiosondes (called dropsondes), which fall under a parachute and make profiles of wind, humidity, pressure and temperature from the balloon to the ground. The dropsondes were launched when the carrying superpressure balloon was flying over convective systems, in order to better describe the thermodynamics of such meteorological phenomena. Each gondola can transport up to 24 such sondes. All the balloons were carried over the Atlantic Ocean due the west, but they were terminated before they will fly over land (except Africa). This is an historical landmark in the search of a better warning system and prediction model in the Atlantic zone where born all the hurricanes that hit northamerica, several of the driftsondes launched in this campaign gathered data from within the circulations that then became hurricanes Florence and Gordon.

However the historical importance of this first flights, the initiative is not new. Back in the 70's the NCAR carried out an study to develope such a system then called "Carrier Balloon" wich was tested in transpacific flights from Oakey, Australia. Nevertheless the lack of funding lead to the project be dismissed.

More information on the Zinder campaign can be obtained at http://www.lmd.polytechnique.fr/VORCORE/McMurdoE.htm and in a recent article published in the University Center for Atmospheric Research in http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/driftsonde.shtml. Also is worth to visit the press release of the CNRS at http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/667.htm.