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

[djellison]

For stereo to work - you either have to have a very long baseline within one payload ( which is a near impossibility given the limitations of size and mass ) - or two simultaneous balloons pointing in the same place, at the same time, at the same altitude ( a near impossibility given the limitations of chaos).

Clouds are usually fuzzy, roughly defined, dynamic objects - I can't imagine that getting stereo imagery of them would be particularly valuable anyway. They're not like a rock. If someone can explain to me how it could be done and why it should be done, then why not....but I struggle to see a means or a purpose at the moment.

You are right however - the first launch ( and indeed I would have thought the first few launches ) are intentionally simple and as far as possible, with redundant systems. i.e VHF GPS, and GPRS/SMS GPS, GMC and onboard cameras etc etc.

And I've got to get a Radio license

Doug

[JRehling]

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