Interesting article on Popular Mechanics - 7/22/2010
The August issue of Popular Mechanics included a nice article on ballooning by Jennifer Bogo entitled "The Race to Dive from 120.000 Feet" which is focused in two of the more recent attempts to beat the four records (height, duration and speed in longest free fall and height for manned balloon) set by Lt. Col. Joseph W.Kittinger during the Excelsior III mission in August 1960: the recent failed attempt of the French parachutist Michel Fournier and the upcoming jump to be carried out by Felix Baumgartner in a still unknowkn date and place.
On regard the Red Bull Stratos effort, the article repeats more or less some of the information already made available by the team and shows in details the capsule and special suit to be used for the mission.
No doubt, the most interesting part of it is concerning the recent failed mission of Michel Fournier whose last attempt was hampered a few months ago when a pressure device activated inside the capsule the pilot's main parachute forcing to cancel the flight when the balloon was half-inflated. The write up tells openly some unknown facts on the mission including the crazy idea to re-use the balloon after inflation: althought common sense and decades of experience tells that once a stratospheric balloon is inflated it's extremelly risky to de-inflate it and packit again for late use, Fournier -having no money for a spare balloon- considered at some point to cut the top of the balloon that was damaged and to reterminate it. With this he would probably loss a million cubic feet of volume but would have enough lift to reach a record breaking altitude. At that point the team of American balloonists supporting Fournier's mission was not willing to send "the man up just to die" and refused to carry on the campaign.
Really a good article to read.
More information:
:: The Race to Dive from 120,000 Feet - Online article
Small balloon launched from Svalbard - 7/1/2010
Longyearbyen, Svalbard.- The most recent and unique balloon mission programmed for this season from the Svalbard Archipelago was carried out by a joint team of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Andoya Rocket Range (ARR) on June 17.
After several delays due to high surface winds, the balloon with a volume of 30.000 cubic meters was hand launched from the airstrip of the Longyearbyen airport at 20:30 utc, and after a nominal ascent of near two hours it achieved succesfully a float altitude of 39.4 km. Then, the balloon started a eastward path crossing the Atlantic Ocean and Greenland and after a flight of near 72 hours the balloon was terminated. 46 minutes after the small payload landed in the southern sector of Ellesmere Island in the Nunavut territory, Canada. A few days after, the landing site was reached by a team from ARR which recovered the payload and transported it to Resolute Bay to send it back to Italy.
The purpose of the flight denominated SURECA (Summer Recovery Campaign) was to test a IRIDIUM based telemetry system called BIT (Bidirectional Iridium Telemetry) and to perform scientific measurements with a piggy-back scientific instrument package called CZT containing a high energy radiation detector based on a Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride sensor made by Istituto Materiali per Elettronica e Magnetismo (IMEM/CNR) from Parma.
More information:
:: News section of ASI web site
:: News section of ARR web site
