Following the successful launch and recovery of a scientific payload lofted by a KerBalloon, the KSA has put in additional orders for further use in its program. KerBalloon says that it will take them several weeks to a month to begin rolling out new units as they want to take into account some feedback KSA engineers had. Development is also moving forward on envelope material that can expand further to contain the lifting gas at lower pressures for reaching higher altitudes.
The payload carried on this first flight consisted of two atmospheric instrument packages designed and built by Umbra Space Industries, which returned with a total of 48 mits of stored data for analysis. The data was taken at 10 and 15km with the payload ultimately reaching a height of 16.531km after nearly 56 minutes – the current record for a kerbal-made object above the surface of Kerbin. During the ascent the lowering external air pressure caused the envelope to expand to over 3x its size at launch (shown at left) until it burst as planned. On the way down data shows the probe oriented itself in a position that produced some body lift and actually achieved a horizontal velocity of 112m/s. Its max total velocity during freefall was 193m/s and the payload survived a peak 14Gs of force when the chute was deployed at 500m above the ground. The 135kg payload landed at 3.8m/s and its parts can be re-used with the Progenitor program, much to the relief of Mortimer.
The ground path of the balloon shows that it traveled through various wind layers on its ascent causing it to meander slightly as it moved westward. Meteorologists are loving this data and can’t wait for more to begin to really understand the weather patterns that now drive Kerbin’s climate since the atmosphere stabilized after the asteroid impact. The science instruments carried aloft are in fact very much designed to help us better understand the new climate conditions that exist on Kerbin and future KerBalloon launches will take place not at KSC but at various points around Kerbin to begin to get a rough idea of global climate.
This week the KSA signed a deal with KerBalloons that has been formulating for the past few months prior to the start of operations at KSC. The balloons manufactured by KerBalloons will provide the Agency with a low-cost platform from which to deploy science instruments for both research and testing. Even the engineering department at KSC has expressed interest in using the balloons to test part crash tolerances from large heights (“way better than lugging things to the top of the VAB and chucking them off. Safer too”, says Lead Engineer Simon Kerman).
