Studying Pacific Ocean typhoons with balloons - 10/17/2008

Hawaii, USA.- A balloon team from the French space agency, CNES, was deployed last August to Hawaii to take part of the project called T-PARC (THORPEX Pacific Asian Regional Campaign). Organized by the World Weather Research Program of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), T-PARC involved university, federal, and military participants from more than 10 countries. The program aim was to study typhoons across the Northwest Pacific Ocean, from their formation in the tropics and subtropics to their typical demise as they move northward and encounter westerly winds at midlatitudes.

The French technicians task was to launch balloons nicknamed "driftsondes" which once airborne drifted with the prevailing winds in a westerly path across the Pacific. Onboard was a service gondola and ballast system from CNES, and a payload built by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which contained sensors which were released from it by command. As they fall to the sea under a parachute these "dropsondes" obtained in-situ measurements of weather parameters and relayed them using an Iridium based communication system to the Operations Center located in Monterey (USA), thus obtaining very valuable data of a region of special importance to understand the dynamic of the formation and evolution of thyphoons.

The operations were carried out from a field base located in the southern tip of Hawaii's big Island. It belongs to Near Space Corporation, a private firm based in Tillamook, Oregon, involved in the ballooning field since the nineties.

The first driftsonde flight was launched on August 19, at 15:50 UTC (5:50 am local time) initially loaded with 38 dropsondes, but due to a rough launch 6 sondes were ejected out of the payload during launch. During the rest of the campaign a total of 17 balloons (with a volume of 10.000 cubic meters) were launched each carrying 38 dropsondes. The average flight duration was of four days.

At left can be seen a short video footage showing the launch of the sixth driftsonde.

The final balloon was released on September 25 while the last balloon in flight fell to the ocean on September 29. A total of 255 dropsondes were released from all the balloons flown.

T-PARC marks the second major deployment of driftsondes, a sensing system created at NCAR and first used on a large scale for the AMMA campaign at Niger in 2006 that studied the earliest stages of Atlantic hurricanes.

More information:

:: Tracking typhoons across the Pacific
:: Driftsonde Facts
:: T-PARC Home Page

BEXUS project completed three launches at ESRANGE - 10/15/2008

Kiruna, Sweden.-A "window" in the bad weather of the last days finally allowed on October 8th to launch three balloons carrying students experiments from the BEXUS 6 and 7 missions. Two of the balloons launched were made of polyethilene measuring 10.000 cubic meters of volume while the third -a smaller one- was made of neoprene and transported a smaller charge. All the operations were carried out at the balloon launch base of the European Space Range in Kiruna, Sweden near the Arctic Polar Circle.

The BEXUS project started six years ago as a "hands on" initiative to help to grow interest of students in the space field. The first launches were some sort of "Piggybacking" flights in the same balloon on which ESRANGE's technicians tested their flight systems. But this year, the two flights had a strong support from European Space Agency (ESA) so the flights were entirelly devoted to BEXUS. Also this year there is a strong presence of experiments of students coming from other countries of the European Union not only Sweden.

Students from different years and courses are involved in the project, which means that different groups of students meet and get a chance to work together on the basis of their respective areas of competence. It is the students themselves who lead, design and build the experiments and the instruments destined for the balloon launch. Most of the data to be collected during the balloon flight is used later in the courses.

The first balloon launched was the corresponding to the BEXUS 6 mission. The experiments transported in the multi-instrument platform were three. LOWCOINS (Low Cost Inertial Navigation System) which was developed at La Sapienza University of Rome and sponsored by European Space Agency (ESA) Education Office. It is a inertial navigation system intended to reach a sufficient level of accuracy in the near future to provide an effective low cost alternative in the production of inertial navigators where extremely high accuracy is not required.

The other two instrument were part of the TURA project developed at Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics, (Kühlungsborn) and the University of Rostock, Germany and sponsored by DLR. The first one TURAWIND (Turbulence in the stratopspheric wind field) was intended to measure turbulent structures in the horizontal wind field from the ground up to the stratosphere while the second TURATEMP (Turbulence in the Stratospheric Temperature Field) have as main goal to study the stratospheric turbulence by measuring the temperature fluctuations.

The launch operation for BEXUS 6 started near 5:00 utc when the gondola was moved by the "Hercules" launch vehicle to the launch position, allowing to start the communication links tests, and final pre-flight checks.Once the Zodiac 10ZL balloon had been inflated, it was released at 7:10 utc starting a drift toward the south east. 80 minutes later the balloon reached the float altitude of 29 km. After a flight of near one hour at that level the gondola was separated from the balloon and landed at 10:15 UTC, just across the Finnish border.

A fourth experiment called ICARUS developed by a combined team from Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti from Romania and the Warrsaw University of Technology in Poland, was at last minute removed from the platform because the video feed was interfering with the balloon's communication system. Nevertheless, the experiment -which involved a small glider to be released in free fall and radio guided back to a predetermined landing area- was launched in a neoprene balloon two hours after the BEXUS 6 mission.

After all operations regarding BEXUS 6 ended, was the turn for the next mission: BEXUS 7.

Onboard the gondola of the BEXUS 7 mission were four experiments. AURORA whose main goal is to study northern lights by measuring physical properties of stratosphere during the flight of BEXUS. It was developed by Università La Sapienza from Italy. STRATOSPHERIC CENSUS consisting of a pump sucking air through a filter that is able to catch particles down to 0.3µm which was developed at Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden, and TIMEPIX the test for a new concept of particle imaging device with high portability, for real-time Cosmic Rays imaging and particle recognition. This was developed under a cooperation between Luleå Tekniska Universitet, Sweden and Charles University from the Czech Republic. All the three experiments were sponsored by ESA.

Finally was included the DOLS (Diversity and Origin of Life in Stratosphere) experiment intended to search for life in the stratosphere which is sponsored by DLR and developed by students at University of Tübingen, Technical University of Dresden, University of Konstanz, Martin-Luther University Halle and Technische Universität München all from Germany and the participation of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Spain.

At 11:00 UTC, preparations at the launch pad began for BEXUS-7. The gondola was moved by the "Hercules" launch vehicle to the launch position, final checks were completed and inflation process began. The release of the balloon took place at 13:35 UTC, starting the climb under a covered sky but with the sun breaking trough the clouds. The balloon reached the float altitude of 26 km without problems, starting then a flight path due to southeast entering in Finland. At 17:00 UTC the payload was separated from the balloon landing over the trees in the border of a small river a few kilometres north of the Finish village of Rovaniemi.

In declarations to the press, Helen Page, ESA co-ordinator at ESRANGE said "...All of the experiments on both balloons were safely retrieved by helicopter, loaded onto a truck and returned to the launch base at Kiruna..."

To obtain more information on each experiment please visit:

:: LOWCOINS (Low Cost Inertial navigation System) - http://digilander.libero.it/lowcoins/
:: AURORA - http://aurorapolarexplorer.googlepages.com/aurora
:: DOLS (Diversity and Origin of Life in Stratosphere) - http://stratolife.wordpress.com/
:: STRATOSPHERIC CENSUS - http://stratospheric-census.org/
:: TIMEPIX - http://timepix-at-space.blogspot.com/