April 13, 2008

MIT-3 Balloon

This flight is a test of an experimental balloon envelope. Hopefully it will acheive float at some altitude.

Launch Time: Approx 5pm Eastern, 4/13/08 Launch Location: Cambridge, MA Downlink Frequency: 10.143 MHz Reception Reports to: w1mx-balloon AT mit.edu

  • Launch at 5:20pm EST
  • UPDATE (6pm): Became roughly neutral at around 10,000 feet and is now sinking slowly.
  • UPDATE (6:20pm): Seems that for some reason the low-order digits of the altitude are getting dropped ocassionally. Valid altitudes have five digits, followed by ’M’ for meters.
  • UPDATE (7:05pm): GPS has lost lock for some reason, last fix at 230210z.
  • UPDATE (10:00pm): After a long outage, GPS has returned. Balloon has landed on ocean surface, and is drifting along. Still transmitting. Please send your reports!
Final position was at FN52pc. Maximum altitude was about 10,000ft. Total flight time was about 5 hours.

Pictures of the launch are here. Additional information about the project is here.