We woke up this morning to completely overcast skies. At the start of this trip we of course an ticipated there would be weather-related cancellations, but today’s sky cover was disappointing because it was the day the OCO-2 satellite was set to target observations over SGP ARM. We checked numerous weather forecasting resources to see… Read More
With four AirCores in hand, Jack, Bianca, Sonja, James, and Scott headed to Caldwell, KS to launch two more balloons today. We thought we were crafty taking time lapses of our launches, but some employees of KanOkla Networks, who welcomed us to set up camp in their backyard, filmed our launches from a drone! Thanks KanOkla… Read More
Because half of our equipment was “indisposed” as of morning, we canceled launches for the day and instead headed out to rescue the “tree’d” AirCores. One great thing about doing launches around here is that it’s almost guaranteed that someone at the SGP ARM lab will know the land owner of the place where our… Read More
Today we launched two balloons back-to-back with (and only with) the help of the Southern Great Plains (SGP) ARM technicians, James Martin and Scott Seabridge. With their help, we are able to launch two balloons about twenty minutes apart, track the flights with two chase teams, and recover the two AirCore payloads to bring back… Read More
We’re not in Kansas anymore…. But we were briefly today! While in Oklahoma we are hoping to launch two balloons each day because we will have launching and tracking help from some of the SGP ARM technicians who have worked with us on previous visits. But since today was Sunday, we kept it simple with… Read More
Jack and Bianca arrived at the Department of Energy’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility on Saturday morning to set up and prep for the next launch. Calling SGP ARM a “facility” is a little misleading because it is essentially a 9,000 square mile swath of north-central Oklahoma and southern Kansas that… Read More
Fun fact: We fill our weather balloons with helium to fly the AirCores, but Albuquerque, NM is the “Hot air ballooning capital of the world”. We caught a few early morning risers while heading out of town to the second pitstop on our AirCore Roadtrip: the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility in… Read More
Tim transited back to Colorado while Jack and Bianca headed straight east on U.S. 40 to Albuquerque, NM. While there are some great sites to explore in Arizona – The Painted Desert, Petrified Forest National Park, and Meteor Crater – we opted to stay in the car and passed through as quickly as we could… Read More
Today was our final launch day in Palmdale, CA and gave us our best flight yet. Our balloon reached 95,000 ft, and followed its predicted trajectory perfectly…almost. Surface winds were higher than originally predicted and the balloon traveled past its projected landing site and landed precisely at the top of a mountain. Jack, Tim, and… Read More
Two balloon launches in one day! Today, we launched at 0700 as well as at 1430. Jack, Tim, and Bianca woke up at 4:00am to prepare for the 0700 launch (timelapse) and were able to catch the sunrise as we set up at our launch site.… Read More