Weekly Balloon News #16
May 10th, 2023 • Some reflections on near-space tourism • JAXA launch GRAINE payload in Australia • Nasa’s SPB balloon completes 2nd. world tour • New Aerostar Thunderhead mission aloft •
I had some inquiries a few days ago as to why if this is a newsletter dedicated to reflecting all the news on all activity involving balloons, I seem to be ignorant of the thriving and bustling world of balloon-based "space tourism". While I must have mentioned the issue from time to time, I think this is a good opportunity to clearly state my position on the issue.
Despite being so involved with scientific ballooning and the recent series of commercial initiatives around so-called near space, I am very, very refractory to the agendas of certain companies competing to offer "space" tourism services fueled only by their marketing departments. Many companies seeking to obtain huge revenue by jumping into the last hype in the field, simply overlook how complicated and risky it is to keep human beings alive in an environment as hostile as the stratosphere and even more to bring them safely back to earth.
Many think they can replace with marketing and ambitious goals the lessons that the history of manned balloon missions left us, in many cases at the cost of valuable lives.
So, in a few words, the only thing you will see in these humble pages is the chronicle of those efforts that from my point of view I consider more real, with specific achievable objectives and based on a responsible scalability of the steps followed. It doesn't matter what company it is, as long as its developmental path respects those principles.
I will simply ignore the rest. For the sake of safety.
JAXA launches the GRAINE experiment from Australia
In late April, the first of the two balloon-borne missions planned for this year’s campaign of the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) in Australia was finally launched. The launch took place at the Alice Springs Airport, and counted with the local support of staff from the Australian Balloon Launching Station managed by the School of Science of the University of South Wales in Canberra.
According to the news published by JAXA on its website, the B300 model balloon with a volume of 300.000 cubic meters was launched as mission B23-01 at 21:02 UTC on April 29, 2023. Two hours later, the balloon reached the planned altitude of 36 km, remaining in flight for a little more than 26 hours. Separation of the balloon and payload occurred at 23:17 UTC on April 30 and the landing took place about 220 km south of Longreach, Queensland. The payload was recovered in good shape.
The balloon transported an experiment called GRAINE, an acronym for Gamma-Ray Astro-Imager with Nuclear Emulsion which aims to observe cosmic gamma-rays in the energy range 10 MeV–100 GeV. The novelty of the instrument in the domain of the spectrum it observes is the use of nuclear emulsions as a tracking device. This technique allows to record the 3D trajectory of a charged particle with extremely high accuracy.
The project has been developed since 2004 by an extensive collaboration between Kobe University, Nagoya University, Okayama University of Science, Gifu University, and Aichi University of Education, and the fundamental support of JAXA. The first balloon flight was made in June 2011 from Taiki, in Hokkaido with a small version of the instrument to check the feasibility of the concept. Then in 2015, the first Australian flight from Alice Springs tested the detector’s performance. In 2018 with a more mature design and large area collection, the first celestial source detection was achieved also over Australia. The experiment flown last week was originally planned for 2021 but postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The reason that leads to JAXA choosing in the last years Australia as the launch site for some of their experiments is related to some instabilities in the weather patterns in northern Japan that often prevents the realization of some balloon-borne experiments, especially the heavier ones or those which require a long-duration flight.
A second balloon mission is planned for this year’s Australian campaign. The flight will aim to carry out a drop test of a space capsule named Sample Return Capsule (SRC). It will subsequently be flown on JAXA’s Martian Moons Exploration space mission.
The SRC will be released from the balloon at 39-40km altitude. It will be in free-fall till it reaches 16 km altitude when it will separate into three bodies. The main instrument, weighing 24kg will then come down to earth on a parachute. The two heat shields, weighing 18kg and 5kg respectively, will continue in free-fall to earth.
The launch window for the SRC test closes on May 15th.
Nasa’s Super Pressure Balloon completes second world tour in the southern hemisphere.
At about 3:35 UTC on May 4, 2023, NASA's balloon mission 728NT completed its second world tour. The Super Pressure Balloon carrying the Super-BIT telescope was launched from Wanaka, New Zealand on April 15 and at that moment it was aloft for 18 days and 2 hours.
After crossing the 169º meridian, the balloon continued its perpetual eastbound path across the Pacific Ocean and by May 6, it approached the coast of South America for the third time. Unlike the previous two times (one at night, and the other with bad weather below) on this occasion, the balloon was very visible to the people of several cities of the Aysén region in Chilean Patagonia.
The balloon passed successfully above the Andes Mountains and entered the Argentinian territory over the Chubut province during the evening, passing almost unnoticed as it crossed during the sunset and early night above desert areas. By the early minutes of May 7th, the balloon started to fly above the Atlantic Ocean again.
Since its launch from Wanaka, the balloon drifted mainly over the three major oceans: the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean and crossed briefly the land of four countries: New Zealand once, Chile, and Argentina three times, and twice above the French Austral Territories of the Kerguelen Islands.
At the time of publishing this issue of the newsletter, it was less than a day away from completing its third full turn.
As part of its outreach efforts to bring more visibility to such a successful mission, last week, NASA shared with the public two more pictures obtained by the Super-BIT telescope onboard the balloon.
Back in Wanaka, the weather prevented twice the launch of the second payload waiting on the flight line: the EUSO-SPB2.
The instrument, aimed to detect Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) and search for astrophysical and cosmogenic neutrinos that will be launched as mission 729NT according to NASA nomenclature, is ready to fly since late April but it has not even managed to reach the launch pad in the two attempts that NASA has set so far.
The main reason for both cancellations has been a huge bad weather system that also prevented last week the planned launch of an Electron vector by Rocket-Lab from Mahia, New Zealand.
The next launch attempt for EUSO-SPB2 will be held this weekend (May 13/14).
Months-long Aerostar Thunderhead mission launched
On May 3rd, 2023 at 14:51 utc Aerostar launched a Thunderhead balloon mission from his brand-new flight facility near Hurley (SD). In the following days, the balloon, with call sign HBAL628, moved south across Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Its current location is in north Texas, returning to Oklahoma from time to time.
Its mission is to spend several months aloft performing navigation patterns and sustained hovering over areas of interest.
This time, the details came not from an inside “source” but from a news report produced and aired recently by WCCO from Minneapolis.
Below these lines, you can see the video on which you will find a detailed view of the Thunderhead balloon, launch procedures, payload, and even a tour of the balloon manufacturing and flight control center of Aerostar.
To the trained eye of your humble servant accustomed to squeezing stones to get a few drops of little information, the news segment brought with it an interesting revelation: that HBAL620, a Thunderhead balloon launched from X58 - Indiantown Airport in Florida on March 2, is still aloft, orbiting in what we could define as the playground of Aerostar in the Gulf of Guinea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
As we can see in the capture below, the balloon has been in flight for 62 days at the moment of the shooting.
Not long ago, another Thunderhead balloon (HBAL614) was in flight in that area reaching the 100 days aloft milestone by March 22nd, 2023.
However, there is a great chance that the balloon is no longer in flight (confirmation pending).
New contents in StratoCat
Back on track this week, with the completion of the 4th GRAINE project balloon flight in Australia, I took the opportunity to update the flight records of all the previous missions.
GRAINE (an acronym for Gamma-Ray Astro-Imager with Nuclear Emulsion) started as far as 2004 as a cooperative effort among several Japanese Universities. Its first iteration, a very basic version of the actual instrument flown as proof of concept, flew in 2011 above Japan (in fact above the Pacific Ocean off Japan).
That first test was followed by three more flights of longer duration above Australia: in 2015 (15 hours aloft), in 2018 (17 hours aloft), and now in 2023 (27 hours aloft).
As usual, all the flight reports are full of technical details, pictures -when available- and external references on peer-reviewed papers, freely available thanks to Sci-Hub and the open-access community.
That’s all folks! Thanks for reading this. If you like it, spread the word and bring new friends to join.
See you in a few days.
I COMPLETELY agree with your position on the strato-tourism companies. We're behind you!