Flight #2003-1 "Zamboni"
Launch Date: April 26th, 2003
Wednesday, April 30th:
Video is now online (divx). Available are a
30 second clip (2M) of the launch,
or the Full 19 minute video (177M) for
those with bandwidth to burn.
Tuesday, April 29th:
Launch photos 1
and launch and recovery photos 2 now online.
Warning: these images
are big, so they may
take quite a while to download.
Monday, April 28th:
Flight photos now online.
Sunday, April 27th:
Recovery site photos now online!.
Success!
The first balloon flight of 2003 went off today with very few
hitches. The gondola carried both our old and new APRS tracking systems,
and outside was mounted the EE student's Zamboni microsatellite. This
collection, along with a new radar reflector, was lofted on a 3000g
balloon pumped with about 1.5 tanks of helium. Nozzle lift for this
flight was 20 pounds, which included about 4 pounds of free lift. The
cutdown mechanism was damaged by the pull, but worked perfectly. The
balloon was launched from Ray's farm at 10:30 am CDT.
The weather cooperated very nicely, with upper level winds
in the tame range. Even the jetstream was only blowing about 64 mph,
and after punching through that, the balloon moved very little in the
lateral plane. Peak altitude was 105,971 feet, at which time the
chasers saw the balloon pop. Less than a minute later, the timer
triggered the cutdown. The gondola took about 25 minutes to descend
and landed in a field west of Thompson, ND.
The Zamboni satellite suffered a power glitch and shut off its
radio about 45 minutes after launch, but the EEs think the camera may
have continued to take pictures. The new radar reflector, attached to
the gondola with cotton string, parted company with the balloon sometime
during the flight and was nowhere to be found. The only real 'oops' of
the mission was John E's new data logger: the gondola prep crew didn't
know his new design had to be powered on with a switch held closed to
enter record mode. Thus it didn't record any data. Chalk that up under
lessons learned and try again next time. The new APRS tracker worked
flawlessly, to the amazement of Ryan and Mike, who had all kinds of
trouble with the M12 GPS engine board when testing the night before.
The more powerful transmitter helped chasers copy almost 100% of the
packets, while the more marginal signal from the original transmitter
was hard to copy during the wild gyrations of descent. The trip to
100K+ feet didn't damage the Yaesu VX-1R transmitter's LCD display or
lithium ion battery pack, so we're confident in using this system in
the future.
The primary purpose of this mission is to test the new APRS tracking system
we built over the winter of 2002/2003. This
new tracker will be lighter,
draw less power, and
transmit
a signal two to four times more powerful than
our old one. While the old system has served us well, it has suffered much
abuse (including hitting the ground at 60mph, being dunked in lake water
twice, incorrectly powered to the point of giving off smoke,
and other indignities). The plan is to fly both the old and new
system on a mission to verify the new system's capabilities, while the
old system will serve as a backup in case of any problems.
We will also be flying a microsatellite bus in piggy-back configuration.
UND Electrical Engineering students have built "
Zamboni", a satellite system carrying dual digital cameras, as well
as other spacecraft systems such as power generation and communications.
While our balloons don't quite make it to low earth orbit, they do achieve
a high enough altitude to allow a reasonable test of the little satellite.
Return to the UND HABP webpage.