Flight #T2000-4 "Persephone I"

Launch Date: June 22, 2000



January 2, 2001

Ground photos of the flight now online.

June 22, 2000

Uffda! Flight #T2000-4 was flown this morning from the Olson Farm near Mayville, North Dakota. Blaise did a beautiful job putting the final touches on the payload last night. We decided to use one of the 600g latex balloons we rescued from the garbage when UND Aviation was cleaning out their storage closet. I actually inflated the balloon we used the night before with compressed air to make sure it wouldn't disintegrate. The old balloon worked well, but did not stretch uniformly and looked very odd in flight.

For the first 50' of ascent, the balloon and tether worked fine, but after that the wind grabbed it and tried to take it down-range. The result was the balloon lost altitude and the tether was nearly horizontal. We moved our anchor point to prevent creating a hazard to nearby road traffic with the low-lying tether, and found the only way to allow the balloon to gain altitude was to let out line fast! So fast, in fact, we ended up burning up the brake mechanism on our reel, and the reel itself warped and was slightly charred. The payload never did gain more than about 300' of altitude, and when the reel warped and jammed, the balloon again descended over the partially flooded farm field we were attempting to photograph. The payload got repeatedly dunked in the water and bashed on the land as we struggled with our damaged tether equipment to try to reel it back in. We finally used a greasegun to lubricate the reel and were able to start making some headway at getting the package back.

When the balloon was about 200' from our position, the balloon had finally had enough bashing and stretching from the wind and popped. John G went and retrieved the waders he had very cleverly brought, and mucked through mud up to his knees to retrieve the package.

The film will be developed this afternoon, and we'll see the results of our rather frustraiting mission then. Not all the cameras took all their pictures, but we should have enough to make the mission worthwhile. The payload internals were surprisingly dry, and although the microcontroller stopped working, the cameras were all fine.

This adventure has given us some food for thought on doing tethered balloon work in North Dakota (one of the most windy states in the US), and we are considering trying to use a large kite to loft lightweight payloads in a wind.

June 16, 2000

We've moved our launch date back a week to take into account the flooding in ND and illness of one of our team members.

June 15, 2000

Well, we obviously didn't make our 'April' launch date for 2000-3. Blaise is now well into building the tri-camera gondola for the mission. I don't know at this time if the GPS will be flown on this mission or not. No 2M beacon will be included, since the flight will be tethered (we will include a cutdown and timer, however, as well as a parachute, since other tethered missions have shown them to be good backups to have in case of disaster).

Our original launch location was to be the Olsen farm, but due to the big thunderstorms we had and subsequent flooding of the farm, we may have to choose another location.

February 28, 2000

Mission #2000-3 will be a rather ambitious mission. Here's the planning document from Blaise, the PI for this flight: 

     Mission 2000-3: "Persephone" A Repeatable Hyperspectral Imaging Experiment

     Launch: April, late June and August (Persephone I, II, and III respectivly)

     Primary Mission Objective: 
     In anticipation of the CERES mission, our objective is to image North
     Dakota farm land in the three CERES bands: Green, Red and Near Infrared.

     Secondary Mission Objectives: 
     1) To use GPS data to georeference images, and conduct ground truth measurments.
     2) To use the red and near infrared bands to compute and graphically present a crop health index.
     3) To archive the data and make it available to researchers working on the UMAC CERES project.

     Procedure:

     Three cameras, two will carry panchromatic black and white film the third
     will carry black and white infrared film.  The two panchromatic cameras
     will use broad band interference filters to allow only the green and red
     bands to enter those cameras. The infrared film is sesitive to 900nm 
     so that camera will use an near infraredlong pass filter to cut everything
     below 750nm.


You can read more about UMAC's CERES project online.

Gondola construction photos to be added later.


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