Flight #2000-5 ""
Launch Date: July 22.
August 7, 2000
Recovery photos now online. Thanks to John Engle
for taking them and sending them to us!
July 22, 2000
Flight 2000-5 went pretty well today. Launch was from a farm near Northwood,
ND. Our payload was rather heavy, and balloon lift was marginal. This caused
the flight to only reach a maximum altitude of about 6,000 feet before the
cut down triggered at 2 hours and 20 minutes into the flight.
Due to this, the radiation measurements from the Geiger counter were not of much
interest, however the pictures taken from the two 35mm cameras turned out very
well. The vertical camera was fitted with a UV haze filter, and the horizontal
camera a polarizing filter. Both helped image quality imensly, and the
low-altitude perspective gave many fine photos of the North Dakota plains.
July 19, 2000
We have decided to try for a launch of the Geiger counter package again on
Saturday, July 22, from 6 miles south of Larimore, North Dakota at about 9:00
am.
It is not know if the 35mm film cameras survived their dunking in Devils Lake.
If not, we have to procure two new cameras for the mission. The main purpose
of the mission is to capture more upper-air radiation data. The Geiger counter
on Flight 2000-4 showed some very interesting
data above 80,000 feet. We think this was due to the massive solar flare on
July 14, and want to run a comparison experiment on the 22nd.
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