For decades, many agencies, including NASA, have put the balloons in their labs on planes and below satellites. Alan Stern, co-founder of planet scientists and world view company of the Southwest Research Institute of the United States, said: "Commercial balloon flights have new capabilities and have opened up new types of science, such as low-cost monitoring of natural disasters, or by studying the Earth's geology. Explore Venus and more."
(Original title: Scientific balloon: soaring above the satellite above the plane - commercial companies boost the development of the U.S. orbital research)
Reporter Fang Linlin
Satellites can cover the globe, but provide lower resolution images. In contrast, the advantage of the balloon's arrival is that it can be examined very carefully on a small area of ​​land. According to Carl Scibitz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, we need balloon observations and they are too powerful.
This view was presented at the recent next-generation suborbital research conference held in Colorado, USA. However, what really surprises the industry is that private companies such as the World View Company have also been able to quickly and cost-effectively deliver payloads to the stratosphere that is 16 kilometers to 30 kilometers.
Admission to Private Enterprises Leaves Research Costs Down
The World View Company truly entered the "eyeball" of the balloon observing scientific community. In 2017, the standardized Stratollite platform it developed caused a sensation. The platform is hung under the balloon and can perform one or more experiments.
Stern said that if a payload is mounted on NASA's balloon, the cost may exceed one million US dollars, but if you share a Stratollite platform with other experiments, you can only get tens of thousands of dollars.
Worldview’s Chief Executive Officer Jane Porter stated that in 2018, the goal is to fly 4 times a month. Each balloon will send a Stratollite platform to the stratosphere. So far, the longest flight has lasted for five days, but it will soon be able to conduct scientific flights for several weeks.
Planetary scientist Robert Green of the Southwest Research Institute conducted an experiment using balloons in October last year to test whether the equipment he designed could perform Venus exploration missions. The surface of the earth is too hot and the equipment cannot work for a long time. Venus has a much milder atmosphere and it is more appropriate to use a balloon test.
Take a balloon provided by the World View Company, which took off from Idaho and flew in Montana after flying 500 kilometers. Like the flying probes, the equipment carried on the balloons measured the changes in the electrical performance of the equipment when flying over the granite-rich mountain below. If you collect such data on Venus, you can understand the geological conditions of Venus surface or underground. They hope to continue experimenting this May.
In addition, the worldview company also found a way to keep the balloons at a certain height. Since the devastating hurricane Maria in September last year, the company has been testing balloons in various places to provide Internet connectivity.
NASA is working hard to develop a long-term research platform
NASA's Deputy Minister of Science Thomas Tseringer Chen said that for many experiments, the platform provided by the world view company is indeed very helpful. But NASA scientists are also developing more advanced next-generation balloon technology, including super-pressure balloons that can fly for 100 days. This type of balloon is suitable for long-term research such as astronomical observations. Of course, such projects have always faced cost and technical challenges.
According to the University of Central Florida planetary scientist Adrien Haydoff, stratospheric balloons offer new opportunities for the physics behind space exploration, such as studying how dust gathers under low-gravity conditions—for the moon and planets. Detection is very important. "My interest is to develop the ability of balloons to conduct related research in microgravity, but this has not yet been achieved."
Looking forward to the future is also the space engineers of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They hope to use stratospheric balloons to listen to low-frequency secondary signals from earthquakes in order to test future seismic exploration missions that may be carried out at Venus.
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