This week the edition is a little short since I have some health problems (nothing serious) that have kept me in bed for the last few days. I hope you like the edition anyway. As always do not forget that you can comment, criticize or correct what is written here, and if you enjoy, spread the word!
Early end to SuperBIT's flight aboard NASA's Super Pressure Balloon
Finally, the goal of 100 days could not be reached: after a little more than 39 days aloft and almost six turns to the southern hemisphere, NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon launched on April 14 from Wanaka, New Zealand with the SuperBIT telescope onboard ended its mission.
The sixth arrival to south american coasts occurred in the very early morning on May 25 when the balloon entered Chilean territory from the Pacific through the Aysen region. On this occasion, the only witnesses of its passage were some early risers from the city of Cochrane who obtained the pictures seen below, the last ones of the balloon in flight.
The balloon continued its march towards the east, once again crossing the Andes mountain range and entering Argentine territory through the Province of Santa Cruz.
By then, NASA was already in contact with EANA (the Argentine equivalent of the FAA) to coordinate the landing.
The balloon would advance some 150 kilometers more into Argentinian territory until finally, around 12:30 utc, the order to terminate the flight was transmitted from the Operations Center in Palestine, Texas and the descent to land began.
The SuperBIT telescope landed on the Patagonian plateau about 120 kilometers NE of Gobernador Gregores.
As I mentioned in previous issues, the telescope included below the solar panel array four capsules prepared to be dropped and land under a parachute during the flight in the advent of any trouble, to avoid total data loss.
The capsules that were developed by StarSpec Technologies (the company also in charge of the stabilization platform and power units for SuperBIT) could store on board up to 5 Terabytes of the data obtained during the flight.
Two of the capsules were jettisoned during the last moments of the flight and landed also in Santa Cruz. According to the local news portal Señal Calafate, one of the pods was recovered the next day by Police personnel from the Rural Operations Directorate of Perito Moreno and Gobernador Gregores as we can see in the image below. The capsule will be handed over to a local firm contracted by NASA to manage its return to the University of Toronto.
There is no information available on the other capsule’s status.
Regarding the recovery of the telescope, through a brief interview made by the channel City News from Toronto with Prof. Barth Netterfield Principal Investigator of the project, we learned that a team from the University of Toronto is traveling to Argentina to coordinate the efforts which could prove difficult due to the isolated landscape, the rugged terrain, and the imminent start of the cold season.
In a publication on its website, the NASA Balloon Program Office explained the reason that lead to the decision to terminate the mission:
In the coming days, the predicted flight path would have taken the balloon more southerly with little exposure to sunlight, creating some risk in maintaining power to the balloon’s systems, which are charged via solar panels. The land-crossing created an opportunity to safely conclude the flight and recover the balloon and payload.
The total flight time for mission 728NT was 39 days and 13 hours, the second longest for a NASA balloon launched from Wanaka. The balloon made six turns around the southern hemisphere and traveled more than 145.600 kilometers.
New capsule tested in tethered ascent
On May 17, 2023, the Japanese startup Iwaya Giken performed a tethered balloon test of a model of the new TYPE-9 capsule. The anchored ascent was conducted at the north end of the runway at Tokachi-Obihiro Airport in Hokkaido, Japan.
The TYPE-9 is a new single-seat experimental capsule that is twice bigger than the TYPE-5 capsule used the last year for low altitude tests as we informed on Issue #14 of this newsletter.
During the test, several ascents were made, in which different members of the team were able to participate in the pilot's seat.
The TYPE-9 capsule will be the one that will be used from now on for the different tests that the company plans to carry out during the year.
A video showing different moments of the test can be seen on the company's YouTube channel.
Aerostar launches Thunderhead balloon for NASA
On May 24 Aerostar, the balloon firm based in South Dakota, launched from its Hurley (SD) flight facility a Thunderhead balloon. The flight was part of an agreement with NASA to host experiments for students from several Universities and Institutes in the United States that participated in the TechLeap Prize. The payloads onboard the multi-day mission were designed to help rapidly advance small spacecraft technologies for autonomous observation of events on Earth and beyond, as well as improve communications and computing power in small spacecraft applications.
The teams/payloads taking part in this flight are:
The Bronco Space Club at Cal Poly Pomona (Pomona, California): an instrument designed to autonomously detect, track, and log terrestrial phenomena such as wildfires.
Orion Labs, LLC (Nunn, Colorado): an experiment to demonstrate the capabilities of quantum machine learning aboard a small spacecraft to reduce downlink bandwidth requirements.
Texas A&M SEAK Lab (College Station, Texas): a payload to automatically identify and classify plumes in Earth’s atmosphere using visible and infrared imaging.
All three teams have already flown those same experiments individually on short-duration missions using Aerostar Cyclone zero-pressure balloons in July/August 2022.
The mission can be followed in real-time using any flight tracking app or website by searching for callsign HBAL-629 (My personal choice is always ADS-B Exchange, which offers free and unfiltered data to the tracking community).
During the first five days of flight, the balloon has been hovering mostly around Nebraska, making some headlines after appearing over Hastings.
Other news in Brief
Last week the balloon division of the French Space Agency CNES announced that they are preparing a Transatlantic balloon flight between the balloon launch base of ESRANGE in Sweden and the Nunavut Territory in Canada. The mission is planned to be carried out in June 2024. As part of the preparation for the mission, a tracking antenna and a new telemetry station to monitor the flight will be installed in the town of Kangerlussuaq a small settlement in the Qeqqata municipality, western Greenland.
In an article published in The Epoch Times last week, defense experts sound an alarm over India’s own ‘Spy Balloon Incident’ in reference to the sighting of a Chinese balloon over the Andamans and Nicobar Islands, a key strategic spot for the country. Among the details offered by the article is the fact that at the time Indian defense officials conjectured that the object was from Myanmar (Burma) which is closer to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands than India’s own southeastern coast. Also as occurred with similar sightings before the Chinese Balloon shootdown in the US in February, there was speculation that it could have been a meteorological balloon. Is good to remember that the incident was made public thanks to people from Port Blair that published pictures of the balloon on social media.
New contents in StratoCat
The new additions/updates of the week in StratoCat are the following:
Full detailed report of the flight of a Japanese balloon made of ultra-thin polyethylene that in 2002 set a new altitude record -that still stands today- of 53 kilometers (really a shame for my project that I have not published anything about this mission until now)
The flight report of a mission carried out in 2019 by World View, the balloon firm from Tucson using its Tycho-20 platform for small payloads. The objective of the flight was to transport the SwRI Solar Instrument Pointing Platform (SSIPP) a miniaturized solar observatory developed at the Southwest Research Institute.
A failed test of a Japanese super-pressure balloon that was performed in 2009 from Taiki, Hokkaido. Lessons learned from the failure led to a re-design of the balloon shape.
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.