Three more flights to close the fall campaign at Fort Sumner - 10/26/2009

Fort Sumner, New Mexico.- Two scientific missions and one technological flight launched during October marked the end of this year's fall campaign at the NASA balloon launch base located at the Fort Sumner Municipal Airport in New Mexico. Following is a brief account of the three launches.

The first scientific mission nomenclated as 602N balloon had as goal to launch ProtoEXIST (Energetic X-ray Imaging Survey Telescope) a test-bench coded aperture telescope devoted to perform wide-field hard X-ray observations using Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride detectors. It is a technology pathfinder for the High Energy Telescope to be placed in the Energetic X-ray Imaging Survey telescope that will be launched by NASA in the future. Their goals are to detect and identify highly obscured black holes, red-shifted Gamma-Ray Bursts and other X-ray sources in the sky.

The ProtoEXIST payload was rolled out to the launch pad four times before to acomplish a sucesfull launch: on three opportunities the operations were cancelled due to the weather while during the October 3 launch attempt a malfunction in a inflation tube forced to abort the operation just before the release. Finally the balloon was succesfully launched on October 9 at 14:45 utc. After an initial ascent phase, the craft reached float altitude of 130.000 feet two hours later and started a very uncommon flight path to the Northeast, crossing Texas, Oklahoma and drifting as far as Kansas where it was terminated at 23:30 utc on that same evening. The payload landed in a corn field near the city of Hays and was recovered in good condition.

The second scientific mission (603N) was devoted to perform an engineering test of the STO (Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory) another NASA-funded experiment designed to survey a section of the Galactic Plane to study the creation and disruption of star-forming clouds in the Galaxy, determine the parameters that govern the star formation rate, and provide a template for star formation and stellar/interstellar feedback in other galaxies. The instrument, built on several hardware items (telescope, gondola) used in the succesfull Flare Genesis balloon-borne instrument, is fruit of a collaboration that includes the University of Arizona, John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab., NASA AMES Research Center & Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, the Oberlin College, the University of Maryland and the Universitaet zu Koeln from Germany. The final goal is to perform a Long Duration Balloon mission in Antarctica in 2011.

The balloon was launched at 16:00 utc on October 15, and after an intial climbing phase it reached float altitude of 125.000 ft. two hours later, remaining on levelled flight until 6:25 utc of next day when the payload was separated, landing 42 kms. West of Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Total flight time was near 14 hours.

A detailed report of the flight and details of the protoEXIST instrument, including images and maps can be seen clicking here while the same is available for the STO mission clicking here

The last mission of the campaign was the technological flight 604NT devoted to test the 29M balloon a 29.000.000 cubic feet gas bag made by Aerostar being qualifyed to be incorporated to the balloon portfolio of the program. The mission started at 14:35 utc on October 17 and after a total flight time of 10 hours it was terminated over Texas, west of the small town of Olton. As usual on clear skies days, the balloon generated some isolated UFO reports in western Texas cities, specially Lubbock.

Again as ocurred with the 39W technological flight at the beginning of the campaign, our friend David "Balloon Hunter" Tremblay managed to capture the exact moment of the balloon/payload separation as can be seen in the sequence at left.

Next activity for the NASA balloon program will be the Antarctic Long Duration Balloon campaign starting in next December to launch CREAM and BARREL instruments and to make another test of the superpressure balloon in the framework of the ULDB project.

Another succesfull year for BEXUS project - 10/13/2009

Kiruna, Sweden.-Seven years had transcurred from that snowy night of November 2002 when a small red box with the "BEXUS I" inscription on his side, was transported by a stratospheric balloon that was released by the Swedish Space Agency from his base of ESRANGE at the gates of the arctic circle. Since then, dozens of students were crowed each year waiting their turn to launch the experiments they made to the fringes of the space. And this year was not the exception.

Althought often mentioned in these pages, let's explain what is behind this initiative. In the beginning BEXUS (Balloon EXperiments for University Students) was only a mean to offer a opportunity to launch small instruments in a technical flight performed at ESRANGE every year before the start of a intensive launch campaign. Nowadays and seven succesful missions later, the project evolved enough to assume a fixed place inside the Swedish Space Corporation flight schedule and in the planning efforts of their partners at Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) and the very European Space Agency (ESA). On the same manner the first missions were open only to students at Kiruna's different space related educative institutions, while now the program embrace several colleges and universities of countries like Czchek Republic, Germany, Italy or Belgium to name a few.

On that framework the students from different years and courses are involved in the project, which means that different groups of students meet and get a chance to work together on the basis of their respective areas of competence. And are the students themselves who lead, design and build the experiments and the instruments destined for the balloon launch. As an aftermath of the experience, most of the data collected during the balloon flight is evaluated and used, later in the courses.

This year, after several cancellations due mainly to weather issues, two flights were performed succesfully BEXUS 8 and BEXUS 9 both launched from ESRANGE in balloons of 12.000 m3 of volume.

Onboard BEXUS 8 was a single experiment developed by the Leibniz-Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Rostock (IAP) named MATI (Measurement of Atmospheric Turbulence with combined Instruments) created to examine levels of turbulence in the upper atmosphere during the balloon ascent in a continuation of a former experiment flown in past BEXUS missions named TURAWIND. Two other small technology experiments belonging to DLR were carried too onboard.

The balloon was launched at 14:00 local time on Saturday, 10 October and after a nominal ascent phase, it reached float altitude of 27.6 km during the 3 and a half hours that endured the levelled portion of the flight. After termination, the payload landed 153 kilometres east of the launch base in Finland.

On regard the BEXUS 9 mission it acommodated 5 experiments reel.SMRT (Space Masters Robotic Team) an experimental capsule attached to a reel and cable system being dropped from the gondola to examine the adverse influences of air resistance and cable friction on "free fall", COMPASS (Calculating and Observing Magnetic Polar field intensities At StratoSphere) that measures the direction and strength of the Earth's magnetic field while the balloon is ascending, NAVIS (North Atlantic Vessel Identification System), a receiver developed for use on tiny satellites for the automatic identification of ships, CRIndIons (Cosmic Ray Induced Ionisation) to measure the extent of ionisation caused by cosmic radiation as a function of altitude and SO-hIgh (SOI: Silicon On Insulator) to test a miniature weather measuring system, to be used on balloons like BEXUS. Originally NAVIS was planned to being part of BEXUS 8 but a couple of days before flight was switched to the crowded BEXUS 9 gondola.

The balloon was launched at 11:33 and after near four hours of flight at 23 km the payload was separated from the balloon and as occured with BEXUS 8, landed in Finland at 15:25 after traveling 205 Km east from the launch site.

If you want to participate on next year BEXUS mission with your college or University, the project just opened the calling for proposals.

More information available at http://www.rexusbexus.net