NASA balloons back in Fort Sumner - 8/31/2011

Fort Sumner, New Mexico Today's launch marked the return to the activity of the main launch site of the NASA balloon program: the Scientific Balloon Flight Facility, located in the Fort Sumner Municipal airport in New Mexico, after almost two years of flight inactivity. The last mission performed there took place on October 17, 2009.

The balloon launched had a volume of eleven million cubic feet, and was devoted as mission 621N to transport a multi-instrument gondola called HASP (High Altitude Student Payload). The project which is managed by the NASA Balloon Program Office and the Louisiana Space Consortium, provide a "space test platform" to encourage students from several colleges and universities to research and to develop small satellite payloads and other space-engineering products. By getting the students involved with every aspect of the program HASP hopes to enhance the technical skills and research abilities of the students in technical areas related to the aerospace field.

The balloon was released at 13:35 utc under perfect weather conditions. After a initial eastward route during ascent at 16:00 utc it reached float altitude of 123.000 ft and started a fast westward course taken by the prevailing winds over central New Mexico and entering at the end of the flight on Arizona. There, at 23:35 utc the separation command was sent and the payload started to descend in his own parachute to the final impact point located west of Holbrook.

As occured before our friend David Tremblay (a.k.a. "The Balloon Hunter") from Ruidoso (NM), 120 miles away from the balloon path, managed to obtain the great pictures we show below of the different phases of the balloon while ascending.

The present HASP mission -the fifth since the program inception- carried instruments developed by Pennsylvania State University's Student Space Programs Laboratory, Salish Kootenai College, University of Maryland, University of North Dakota, University of North Florida and Metro State College of Denver, Colorado. After return to the launch base the HASP gondola will be refurbished for a new flight this season, as the items flown were intended to be launched during the cancelled campaign in 2010, after the failed launch of the NCT payload at Alice Springs in April that year, which derived in the halt of all NASA balloon operations.

Second launch campaign in Japan started - 8/30/2011

Taiki, Japan.- With the flight today of a stratospheric balloon from the Taiki Aerospace Research Field, in the Hokkaido island, formally started the second part of Japan's Aerospace Agency (JAXA) scientific balloon launch campaign for this year. As you may remember from our past updates, the first part of the effort took place on last June and involved only two launches.

The mission carried out in the early morning used a 100.000 m3 of volume balloon and was nomenclated BS11-04. Its purpose was to perform a drop test from the stratosphere of a tiny model of a space capsule resembling an "Apollo" reentry module.

The balloon was released at 4:40 local time, and after an ascent phase of more than two hours, it reached the float altitude of 37 km in a point located 20 km S-SE from the launch base. There, after a few minutes of leveled flight over the Pacific Ocean the drop of the capsule was performed.

The test is part of the effort to develope a small reentry system called µ-LRS (micro-Laboratory Reentry System) consisting of a nano-satellite, which in the future would perform during months experiments on space and then return the materials to earth by mean of a capsule. The scientific team need to gain more information on the various problems to be resolved during orbital reentry as aerodynamic heating and the well know instability in transonic and subsonic regions, and for this reason choosen to perform a drop test by balloon.