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]

Successful launch, and recovery of FHALP3 today. Flight computer seemed to burp it's way from about 500m altitude till recovery - no real data on board, or real time tracking - but - it sent an SMS on landing with it's lat/long, and it was recovered, 67km ENE of the launch site after a flight time of approx 1hr 45mins. No idea on the peak altitude yet - as no proper data on the flight computer. They were trying a dual stage balloon design - an over inflated, and a lower inflation balloon, with the over inflated designed to punch thru the jet stream, cut down, and then the lower pressure to take over...the 'mess' on landing was one burst balloon (high pressure) and one deflated balloon ( low pressure). Personally, I think the high pressure burst, and then damaged the low pressure causing a leak, so that it carried on a little more, before descending. As the flight computer was dead for the entire flight, the cut-down never happened.

Similar camera design to last time ( hence, on the ground at recovery, i said ' You're camera work is CRAP - we have to talk about it!'

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