At IIA, we
are in action to have a high altitude balloon flight programme!!! High
altitude balloon experiments on project basis are rarely carried out in India
and we are among the rare species attempting to have one!!
High altitude balloon experiments involves a complete and thorough knowledge of
the experiment and the steps taken to perform it.
The idea : The basic motivation behind our program is to have a high
altitude balloon mission for ultraviolet observations with a complete record
of flight path including latitude, longitude and altitude.To get to a stage
where we can send our scientific payload and observe in uv is few miles away.
So we decided to have few prequels to our mission with various payloads first being
a simple payload to study atmospheric variations with altitudes by sensing temperature, pressure, humidity.
Plan: We plan to design and built a vessel which can travel to
near space with sensors placed in it to detect the different elements of
atmosphere along with a GPS receiver to help us locate the exact position of
the balloon for recovery. We have planned to have a series of test flights for
our satisfactory purpose so that our final flight will be a successful one.
The 1000g balloons have been ordered from an Indian manufacturer(pawan balloons )
3000g balloons have been imported from China (refer details) for testing purposes
which are to be flown for testing various components using a tethered balloon.
This would give some experience on balloon filling and other related issues.
After satisfactory results of tethered experiments we will carry forward our
experiments by launching balloons.The payload will contain the
black box and the scientific instrument payload .