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]

A 90p thermistor's great...BUT....you need something to read it, log it, and then spit it back out to you on the ground - it becomes a big problem.

There are commercially available stand alone thermometers that log - but they're not cheap. More sense for a first flight might be a simple standalone max/min system like this http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?Module...er&doy=3m10 Something like that will also let me test the GMC sub-ass in the freezer with the lead hanging out.

We wont have a full trace- but we will have a record of the 'worst' conditions both internally and externally. For understanding the 'system' - that's a usefull point.

I want to pack this thing full of as many simple, stand alone, independent systems to get as much as we can, as easily as we can, as cheap as we can - to learn how it all works - so we can say "Yes - we know how to fly a balloon to >80,000 ft and get it back safely"

THEN....we can start thinking about some onboard intelligence that can measure and log...

Lat
Long
Alt
Pressure
Multiple temperatures ( internal battery - internal camera - external - external GMC )
Voltages
Acceleration in 3 axis
Orientation in 3 axis

PLUS - scientific study such as UV etc etc.

But that's a whole realm of 'how the hell....' beyond my knowledge - and I want to figure out how to fly a balloon and get it back before figuring out how to make it a genuine platform for investigation.

[JRehling]

[...]

[centsworth_II]

It might even be worth it to have an "instrument cam" that ONLY looks at a panel loaded with cheap little instruments.

I find this an interesting possibility. I'm surprise to not see any response to it.
One of the instruments could be a compass.