High altitude balloon payload, from Sable-3 discussion Options

[djellison]

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...20&start=20

We began talkin about a UMSF balloon - and who know what might happen if enough people think about something hard enough, thoroughly enough and long enough.

How's about this as a starting point.
http://vpizza.org/~jmeehan/balloon/ with http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/part101.html as an important regulatory start point (I'm going to look up the UK regs for this as well)

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cuspaceflight/nova1launch.html is also very impressive - all done in the UK

This http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/...video_podc.html is particularly impressive - I like the multiple-cameras slant.

Anyway - thought I'd get a thread going - this is an idea I like too much to let it gather dust in a corner - the one thing that I think would be nice to achieve is self-portraiture of some sort - think Beagle 2's WAM etc....perhaps in a corner of the FOV of one of/the imaging system. What sort of limit's should we set ourselves? 1kg 10x10x20cm? (sort of 2U Cubesat-on-a-diet budget)

Doug

[nprev]

Good point, Doug. However, ascent velocity is still contrained by payload weight, so it's still a significant consideration. For recovery purposes, seems like you want to get up & down as rapidly as possible in order to limit your touchdown CEP.

[Astrophil]

Here's an idea for a future mission: re-enact the Huygens probe.

You'd need three cameras (or two if one had a big enough FOV), arranged so as to cover the angles covered by Huygens' cameras. Once you'd recovered the payload, you'd release a subset of the pictures, downgraded to Huygens quantity and quality. The challenge then is to stitch them together as people did with Huygens, making mosaics of the landscape and identifying the landing spot in it if possible.

It'd be an interesting game - and it'd help one imagine what the Huygens imagery really means.