[Space] Good balloon data

Christie Dudley longobord at gmail.com
Tue Jan 12 19:03:42 UTC 2010


Ozzy assures us that there would be many pilots keen on attempting such a
thing.  I think as he puts it "Once you buy a plane, you're always looking
for something more interesting to do than go for a $100 hamburger."

Christie
_______
Getting to the bottom of the hill is convenient. The view from the top of
the hill is stunning. Where would you choose to live?


On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:23 AM, deleted <arbzed at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've thought about this a lot.  A pressure-actuated valve could definitely
> improve you flight time and altitude.  The trouble with a slow descent is
> that it's hard to predict how long the probe will take to descend / where
> it's going to go.  If it doesn't burst, it could stay up a very long time,
> which makes it harder to retrieve.  Ultimately, your limiting constraint is
> battery life.
>
> Something that might work is a retrieval system on an independent power
> circuit from the main tracking system that operates on reserve batteries
> which aren't switched on until the package drops below a particular ceiling
> (assuming the flight computer still has enough juice left to detect
> the altitude threshold and activate the retrieval system).
>
> Are you really considering skyhooking?  That sounds incredibly difficult
> and dangerous.  I like it!
>
> dlt.
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Christie Dudley <longobord at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> So I was cruising the ham-high altitude balloon sites and came across a
>> list of recommended manufacturers for balloons.  It occurred to me that once
>> we get this into "production" mode, we might want to talk about buying these
>> things in bulk, etc. so I thought I'd check them out.
>>
>> The first manufacturer I was looking at had all sorts of useful
>> information on their different balloon models.  The last 3 struck me as
>> stuff that we were talking about empirically determining.  It makes oh so
>> much more sense for us to take these on spec.  Considering, for example,
>> this manufacturer offered 4 different models had different values for each
>> of these.  The ones that jumped out at me:
>>
>> Diameter at Burst (cm) - Bursting Altitude (km) - Bursting Pressure (hPa)
>>
>> It struck me that if we knew what the bursting pressure should be, we
>> could conceivably find a valve that would do a limited release  once it
>> neared bursting pressure so the balloon doesn't burst.  If it doesn't burst,
>> just loses buoyancy, then it should just start slowly sinking and more
>> gently come back down, making it easier to skyhook, and overall reducing the
>> velocity of the descent, independent of parachutes and other measures, not
>> to mention making the balloon itself potentially reusable.  Just a thought.
>>
>> Christie
>>
>> _______
>> Getting to the bottom of the hill is convenient. The view from the top of
>> the hill is stunning. Where would you choose to live?
>>
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>
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