Two launches, one early termination - 12/30/2010

McMurdo Station, Antarctica.- Finally NASA returned to activity after a halt of near eight months. Althought in the last weeks two small balloons were launched for the benefit of Darmouth's College BARREL mission (see bellow) two big balloons (39 million cubic feet of volume) were launched one week apart from the Williams Field Airport near McMurdo Station.

The first mission numbered as 614N was devoted to launch an instrument denominated CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass) which is performing his sixth Antarctic trip since 2004. It is a very complex instrument developed by a collaboration between the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from USA, as well Ewha Woman's University, KAIST and KyungPook National University, from Korea the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie, Grenoble and the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements of France and Universidad Nacional Autonoma from Mexico. The objective of CREAM is to perform direct measurements of cosmic ray composition and energy spectra cosmic rays over the elemental range from hydrogen to iron, through a series of long duration balloon flights. The final goal of this multi-mission experiment is to collect sufficient statistics to test the current models of cosmic ray acceleration and propagation in the Galaxy.

The launch occured at 1:42 UTC time on December 21 under excellent weather conditions. After a nominal ascent phase the balloon started the typical anti-clockwise path at a mean altitude of 125.000 ft.According to the first reports both the CSBF systems and the instrument itself were performing nominally. Also during the first hours of of flight the telemetry and commanding was functional through the Line of Sight system and both satellite systems: TDRSS and Iridium. That condition was maintained until December 26, when shortly after completing the first half of the first turn to the pole and while flying over Queen Maud Land, due to unknown reasons the CREAM balloon suffered an uncommanded termination: the payload was suddenly separated of the balloon and started a descent under his parachute. As soon the event was detected, the CSBF Operation Center in Palestine, Texas started the emergency protocol for a complete termination by satellite (the so called "over-the-horizon" procedure). The critical part of this was achieved succesfully with the separation of the parachute from the payload that prevented the dragging of the instrument once on the ground. At first sight, the payload landed mostly undamaged -as continued to send location data via satellite- in a point located 300 miles from the Halley Research Station, which is operated by the British Antarctic Survey. .

The second mission launched in this period, involved a similar balloon and was nomenclated as 615N. The flight started on December 27, and at the time of this writing (merely two hours after that) the balloon was performing flawlessly. On board was BLAST-pol (Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetery) an instrument which combines a 1.9 meter Cassegrain telescope and a submillimeter polarimeter to determine the role that play the magnetic fields in star formation. A previous version of the instrument has had two scientific flights one from Kiruna, Sweden, in 2005 and the other in Antarctica in 2006. After landing of the last mission in 2006, the parachute failed to detach from the gondola and was inflated by the wind dragging for miles and miles the instrument, demolishing it. The instrument is part of a collective effort that involves the followng institutions: University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, University of Miami, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, NASA's JPL, INAOE (Mexico), Cardiff University, University of Puerto Rico and IRA-INAF

A detailed chronicle of the launch and the day-to-day evolution of the mission can be seen n the weblog "Dropping BallAst".

Stay tuned for the last launch: the ULDB (Ultra Long Duration Balloon) test flight, which is flight ready and after a pair of cancelled launch attempts probably will be the first balloon launched of 2011.

Second BARREL launched endures only one day aloft - 12/19/2010

McMurdo Station, Antarctica.- The days from our last entry were plenty of activity for those taking part of the 2010/2011 balloon launch campaign at the Williams Field Airport located in the vicinity of the McMurdo Station.

First of all NASA performed several tests not only to the basic equipment to be used in the launches but to the launch vehicle, "The Boss". All this to comply with the new regulations impossed by the Investigation Board after the publication of the recent report about the Australian incident that occured in last April. Also new restrictions on the position of spectators around the launch site and new security areas are being evaluated to assure full safety. Of course this is in advanced preparation for the three big payloads to be launched this season: CREAM, BLAST-Pol and another test flight of the Ultra Long Duration balloon.

But, back to the "minor leagues" of ballooning, the first BARREL balloon -hand launched as misson 612N in December 13- instead of traveling in the usual anti-clockwise heading around the pole over the continent, took a northward flight path over the open Ocean, being terminated after six days of flight some point between the white continent and Australia as can be seen in this map.

The day before the termination of the first BARREL mission, was launched the second payload as mission 613N which this time taking advantage of a well formed and stable polar vortex, started the expected flightpath. Nevertheless, merely one day after launched it was also terminated, landing near the base. At this time we don't know if the mission was planned to endure only one day or the early termination was due to some malfunction of the payload or balloon. Also we ignore if a recovery of the payload will be tried.

As we mentioned before, the main goal of BARREL is to measure bremsstrahlung X-rays produced by precipitating radiation belt electrons as well as variations in Earth's magnetic field. While the primary purpose of these particular missons was to test prototype hardware and launch procedures, a flotilla of balloons carrying that same payload will study in the near future electron losses from the radiation belts in conjunction with the ongoing THEMIS satellite mission.

FITE campaign delayed again - 12/19/2010

Cachoeira Paulista, Brazil.- Bad weather and technical problems were the main reasons alleged by the Brazilian authorities through the SLB website to delay again the launch campaign planned for December at the stratospheric balloon launch base of Cachoeira Paulista in the Sao Paulo state, Brazil.

The mission is being planned since 2008 and included the use of a balloon of 300.000 m3 made in Japan, to transport to the stratosphere an instrument called FITE (Far-Infrared Interferometric Telescope Experiment) which was developed by a team of the infrared astronomy groups at Osaka and Nagoya Universities.

The brief statement published today, mentioned Febraury/March of 2011 as the new launch window for the experiment.

As can be seen in the pictures, all the equipment was packed to protect it from the intense heat of the Brazilian summer -including the LASCOS telemetry station- and will remain in Cachoeira Paulista for the next attempt. Only the scientific and technical teams returned home.

First two small balloon launches from McMurdo - 12/15/2010

McMurdo Station, Antarctica.- With a not so well formed polar vortex formed yet, was launched the first balloon of the 2010/2011 Antarctic campaign of the NASA balloon program. The launch took place from the LDB (Long Duration Balloon) facility that every summer the agency assembles at the Williams Field Airport near the McMurdo Station.

Althought it was a small volume balloon, it was assigned with a flight number (612N) and became officially the first mission carried out by the agency since the return to activity after the NCT balloon mishap in Australia in past April.

The balloon was released from the LDB site using a handy system (known as the Hutch Clutch method) on December 13, at 21:44 utc, and currently is flying in a somewhat erratic path, slowly starting to assume the typical anti-clockwise path around the pole.

The payload onboard was an experiment called BARREL (Balloon Array for RBSP Relativistic Electron Losses) developed by the Dartmouth College

The main goal of BARREL is to measure bremsstrahlung X-rays produced by precipitating radiation belt electrons as well as variations in Earth's magnetic field. While the primary purpose of this particular flight is testing prototype hardware and launch procedures, that same payload will study electron losses from the radiation belts in conjunction with the ongoing THEMIS satellite mission.

At left can be seen an image of the launch that we obtained from the weblog "Dropping BallAst" which offers a day-to-day chronicle of the current ongoings from the ice.

A second BARREL payload that is waiting his turn to flight will be launched as soon as the scientific team would establish the good health and performance in flight of the first one.

Also as we mentioned in the title of this post a second small balloon was also hand-launched a few days before, on December 11. It was a "pathfinder" mission, that is simply a balloon with a locating device able to transmit in real time his position to trace the behaviour of the polar vortex, that unique stratospheric wind current that allows during summer months to perform long duration flights in a circular anti-clockwise pattern around the pole.

As the "big" launches come close, we will publish news on the campaign every two days. Stay tuned !

FITE launch campaign started in Brazil - 12/10/2010

Cachoeira Paulista, Brazil.- With the arrival of the scientific teams in mid November and the beginning of the preparations on site, last week was officially started the 2010 balloon launch campaign at the stratospheric balloon launch base of the Brazilian Space Research Agency (INPE) in Cachoeira Paulista. The final objective of the campaign is to launch a 300.000 m3 japanese balloon carrying FITE (Far-Infrared Interferometric Telescope Experiment). Previous attempts in 2008 had encountered technical problems and strong stratospheric winds that forced to cancel the campaign without a flight.

During past days the technical teams of the Japanese Space Agency balloon launch program and their pairs from Brazil started to assemble the different components that will take part in the flight. The visitors worked mainly in the configuration of the LASCOS (Low Altitude Space Communication System) mobile station in use since 1996. It provides balloon trajectory monitoring, telecommand transmission operation and telemetry data acquisition with the advantage of having all that information and data available in any computer terminal on a network connected to the mobile station.

Meanwhile their local partners started to assemble the crane to be used as launch vehicle, worked on the flight train and parachute and tried to figure out the origin of several power cuts at the base (eventually traced to tiny lizards that shortcircuited the electrical panels).

Also during this week was launched a sonde to collect data about the stratospheric winds and to start to modelize all the possibles trajectories to choose the best landing points.

The details of the campaign including pictures and a brief chronicle (in portuguese) are available throught the SLB website.

On the scientific side of the campaign, the instrument FITE is being assembled slowly due to the complexity of the frame that supports the mirrors and the very precise alignement needed to focus the image of distant IR sources in the detector. FITE's goal is to achieve -for the first time- interferometry in the far-IR spectral range allowing to resolve fine structures of protoplanetary and circumstellar disks, star-forming molecular cores, and nuclear starbursts in galaxies.

The instrument is developed by a team of the IR astronomy groups at Osaka and Nagoya Universities, throught grants of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. A very good description of the instrument was published early this year in the astronomy section of the SPIE website.

Stay tuned for more details soon!.

Succesful flight of the HiSentinel stratospheric airship - 12/2/2010

Page, Arizona, US.- After several cancellations in the last year, finally on past November was carried out the flight test of the scaled up version of the HiSentinel stratospheric airship. The launch base for this mission was the local airport in the vicinity of the city of Page, in Arizona, United States, a place with a long and near unknown history in the ballooning field.

HiSentinel is the first airship developed under the Composite Hull High Altitude Powered Platform (CHHAPP) program, a spiral development program for a family of long-endurance autonomous solar-electric, stratospheric airships. Alike other vehicles of the same kind, the HiSentinel is launched like a conventional zero pressure stratospheric balloon and acquire his typical shape once at float altitude. The final goal of the program is to develop a vehicle that no need special facilities like hangars or shelters to be deployed in the operations theater. Once operative it would be capable of lifting small to medium payloads (20 to 200 pounds) to near-space altitudes during entire weeks for communications, military and science applications. The entire project is under managment of the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command with the Southwest Research Institute as prime contractor for technical management, airframe design, performance modeling, support systems, and launch and recovery along with Raven's subsidiary Aerostar International as sub-contractor and COLSA as payload developer and integrator.

This mission nicknamed HiSentinel80 was launched from the Page airport on November 10, according to the press release published by the Army in November 24 "...the purpose of the test flight was to conduct day/night cycle effects on a high altitude airship, as well as test various payload capabilities...". While the flight time for this test was expected to be more than 24 hours, or to stay aloft as long as positive (remote) control could be maintained, the eight hours that the ship stayed at an altitude of 66,300 feet, were considered a success, as valuable command and control and payload connectivity data was collected before flight end. The remains of the airship were recovered the next day a few miles north of Monticello, Utah.

A tiny video shot of the moment of the release is available on YouTube

As you may remember from our past updates, 2009 was a turbulent year for the project as the flight attempts suffered several changes and cancellations: it was started during the fall campaign in early October at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility station in the Fort Sumner Municipal airport, and after almost one cancelled launch attempt the operations were moved to Arizona. There some malfunctions in the hardware, added more complication to the effort and finally the nail in the coffin came from the aviation authorities whom finally refused to allow the balloon/airship release.

Now, this success surely will boost the spiral development to achieve greater payload capacity, greater power capability and longer keeping station endurance in the near future.