Another high-altitude balloon surged into the stratosphere with a launch last week. A group of Arvada students released the balloon from their high school in a suburban area near the mountains. Rising from this great launch site, the balloon payload returned some excellent aerial photos both of Denver and of the snow-covered Front Range. Read on for details about the flight and protracted recovery effort.
Working out the back of a pickup we'd parked in the school lot, the students and a couple of us dirtbag astronauts fitted a styrofoam balloon payload with a camera, a SPOT personal locator beacon, an improved high-altitude GPS tracker, and a temperature/pressure logger, while other students prepared a huge latex weather balloon and parachute. The students released the balloon into blue, contrail-streaked morning skies.
With the balloon away, the recovery crew sped off into eastern Colorado. We tracked the balloon for an hour and a half until... the updates abruptly ceased. No position fixes were reported from the ground, leaving us with an enormous possible landing zone to search. We spent several hours spooking pronghorn as we drove backroads and wandered rangeland on foot in a hopeless search downwind of the the last reported location, and eventually retreated to corned beef and cabbage in Kiowa, CO.
Recovery failed. Until...
On Friday morning, a rancher near Kiowa, CO spotted the shredded debris of our balloon as she was moving livestock. On Monday, she called in concerning a reward message we'd attached to the outside of the styrofoam payload housing. Pat retrieved the slightly dented but intact payload yesterday. We opened the payload to find the equipment in good condition--some of it still running! The flight yielded some great photos and lots of data to send back to the students. GPS tracking data shows the balloon popping at 106,000 feet!
We'd still like to know what happened during the flight to disable our tracking system and prevent us from finding the payload last week. The payload doesn't look like it impacted the ground too hard--the force was equivalent to a fall off a 40-foot building, not bad for a descent from 20 miles up. After landing, the camera took several hours of photos of sunlit rangeland that show that the payload came to rest on its side.
The tracking unit was still powered up when we opened the box this morning. Data from the augmented instrumentation setup may shed some light on the tracking failure.
