Article

Here’s a quick summary report…thanks spacegrant.oregonstate.edu/ for your support…

LaunchPSU 05 Lunar Periscope (June 15, 2006) [Final Report: Periscope component attached below]

Got a minute…This was a ton of fun if you forget the moment I freaked when we lost contact with the balloon ~ 8,000ft off the deck during the final descent. (We had just lost a balloon that same way a few weeks prior.)

All ends well in this story however. Here’s the story…

We launched a 54,000ft^3 polyethylene balloon which carried a periscope imaging system to view the Earth at altitudes up to 120,000ft. What a gas! The balloon sped away from us at a maximum of 124mph heading to Nevada from our launch site in Millican, Oregon, just 22 miles east of Bend. We thought we were in trouble when we realized the balloon was well over 80 miles from us (as crow flies) and the roads we were on put us 140 miles away. But the balloon reversed is direction at around 70,000ft allowing us to catch up and we picked up the ground coordinates just south of Drew’s Reservoir, 16 miles west of Lakeview, 12 miles north of the California border. We waltzed about 1.7 miles to the stuff, lying neatly in a beautiful location with a view to the reservoir.

Stats
4 hours 32minutes aloft
Maximum ground speed 124mph
Maximum Elevation 123,634ft above sea level
Ground distance traveled 120 miles
Over 1,100 images taken by onboard camera
~6lb pay load (parachute, control box, science box, string)
890 miles round trip!

Hardware and diagnostics...

Science Box: Periscope system, motor driver, controller, Hall Effect sensor, battery power, inside temperature, Back-up high resolution digital camera, back-up radio transmitter (dog collar with 40+ mile range)

Control Box: GPS, Radio with TNC, antenna, heater, battery power, inside and outside temperature, absolute pressure, toy pigs

We recovered everything with perhaps only minor impact damage to the periscope camera. We will launch again!

The chase took us through plenty of gentle, lonely country and was filled with the emotional highs and lows of any balloon flight. I’m attaching several images that capture some of the things…please keep an eye out for updates to the ‘LPSU’ web pages (just google). We will post more images, data, and movies from the trip. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder how this could possibly be for college credit. Folks were watching the launch and chase on the web. We will notify you next time (next week in fact) so you can follow our progress if you are interested; www.findu.com if you know how to use it. (Look for KE7HVE-1 for the balloon, KE7HVE-2 for the chase vehical.)

Keep in touch,

Mark Weislogel and team of allstars…

Jules Eiche, Pete Levno, Nathan Visan, Jennifer Jones, Donovan Finnestad, Juniors ME
Josh Hatch (man on the ground) B.S.M.E.
Danny Bolledula, M.S.M.E
Yongkang Chen, Post Doctoral Fellow
Joerg Klatte, visiting scholar, Bremen Germany (with Purdue U. friend Alexander)

…
If you are still reading, and into this ballooning thing, here’s the dirt…
…

The original mission was to align and image a moonset at approximately 120,000ft elevation above Oregon. The project required a surprisingly complex orbital mechanics analysis just to get the launch time correct within a 20 minute window to image the event which only happens once or twice monthly with the right lighting conditions (position of the sun). Great idea. It’s just that it turns out that the timing of the whole affair is highly sensitive to the rise rate of the balloon which is apparently difficult to control with our present Helium fill method. Our intended rise rate was 1000ft/min, resulting from approximately 2lb of free lift. But perhaps the wind (~ 5+mph gusts) at the launch site prevented an accurate free lift measurement leading to an under-fill of the balloon. Our measured rise rate was 673ft/min. So, bummer, it took us an extra 58.3min to get to 120,000ft whereupon the moon had long set. Our periscope camera turned on at around 45,000ft and we are still looking through the 1120 flight images to see if it’s in there somewhere, but it’s nearly certain the moon had set for all our times at elevation. Also, our ‘low elevation’ images (778 of them) are obscured to various degrees by ice collecting on the periscope which sublimated at higher elevations.

The periscope system is cool and would be worth perfecting. It finds a preprogrammed position using a Hall Effect sensor and then rotates to get the image at the right time. It takes over 1000 high resolution (8Mpx) images too and can do 360 degree panoramic images at variable image rates. It has a huge variety of programming options. Last minute glitches in the periscope, and insufficient time to test all components thoroughly prior to launch, lead to an inoperative sensor and a gear-seized drive mechanism during the flight. The power draw for the system doubles as the heat source for environment control at altitude. A back-up high resolution digital camera experienced a battery failure after the first image it took on the ground and the inside temperature sensor for the periscope box was not programmed correctly and did not collect data. Two radio batteries died in the chase vehicle each leading to increasingly frightening, but nonetheless temporary losses of contact with the payload.