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]

Really! What kind of sensor is used to detect the balloon burst? Only things I can think of are some sort of tether tension cell (like a maritime winch) or an indirect acceleration measurement from an onboard nav system. Would be interested to know the actual method, because both of these techniques seem pretty awkward.

[ElkGroveDan]

Really! What kind of sensor is used to detect the balloon burst?

A sudden acceleration of -9.8 m/s/s is the triggering signal. When that force is applied on a (now) untethered gondola there will be (relative to the gondola) an upward movement of air that will inflate the parachute.

I tried to take out a patent on it in mine and Doug's names (using Doug's diagram) but apparently its been done before.

[JRehling]

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