Recap of EOSS-090

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From the Launch Team and Ground Station

by Merle McCaslin, K0YUK

A lot of us tell ourselves we do this balloon stuff for fun. Years ago when things weren't going very smoothly Jack Crabtree yelled out, "When does the fun begin?" We some times still joke in the heat of the battle, when does the fun start. Well this was a fun one although we were not sure it would get off at all.

I sent Suzanne Smith the weather reports and hinted that she should postpone but, no, she came anyway. I didn't realize until Saturday that they only had one more week of school with finals this week and graduation next Sunday the 8th.

Interesting reason as to why graduation is on Sunday. If I have the story right, it is because they have a law or rule in Kentucky that the Kentucky derby is held on the first Saturday in May. So graduation is held on Sunday.

I arrived at Gene's place Saturday morning at 6:45 and as Randy Collander predicted, it was pretty well socked in. Good job Randy and thanks for all the weather forecasting. Dave Galpin KB0LP, Nick Hanks N0LP, Mike Herod KJ0R, Larry Cerney K0ANI, and others were busy on the ground station set up and check out. The U. K. folks were making final checks on the plane.

Around 8:00 A M it cleared some, and the visibility improved to a few miles. Randy told me the cloud layer was not to thick and didn't think there would be much moisture in it to cause icing and Nick reminded me how calm it was. So it looked like we could get the plastic balloon in the air. I made the decision to go with the 54K plastic balloon and not the backup plan of a 3000 gram balloon.

I think Suzanne must have brought some kind of good luck charm with her because there was a window of just a couple of hours for the launch. Contrary to some reports it never did clear up and an hour or so after launch it started raining and snowing again and rained on us the rest of the day until we got to Denver about 2:00 pm.

I had some good help on the launch prep and actual launch from lots of folks. Gene got some troops to lay out some of his big tarps. Dave, Jim, Larry, BJ, Don and Andrew who was from U.K.

The gross inflation (GI) on this flight which is GI= (payload + balloon wt)*1.2 was right at 50 pounds. The Raven chart showed we were just under the 100, 000 goal. All of the weights came in heavy even the balloon was heavy 15.1 pounds and the Raven chart showed it at 13.6 pounds.

There was a light wind at launch just about right so the payload handlers did not need to run. We made the launch at 9:21 am MDT. The balloon seemed to rise slowly compared to the 3000 gram balloons. I had thoughts as did Nick and others did we get enough gas in it. The ascent rate was a little slower than expected it started out around 750 ft. per minute and it averaged 903 ft per minute over the flight.

The rest of the morning was spent in a hectic ground station. Mike Herod described that Gene's room seemed to get a lot smaller. There was a crowd in the room with the U. K. ground station crew as well as ours. Nick, Dave, Randy Reynard NQ0R and Mike were all manning the ground station, tracking the flight on APRS, and coordinating with the trackers and the FAA.

At 95,000 ft. the U. K. team commanded the wing deployment. We didn't exactly see the wings deploy, it happened quickly. The picture was faint on the T. V., but came in to view soon and looked good.

As the payloads landed, we listened to the trackers, the power line story and search and recovery of the balloon.

This is the second time we have flown a balloon this big 54,000 cubic feet. The reason for using the large balloon was that Dr. Smith wanted to get to 100,000 ft to simulate the Mars atmosphere. We came close at 97,872 but she was very happy with the results.

All the flights have been fun but, this one seemed special and what a great group of folks and impressive students to work with.

The following is a note I received from Dr. Suzanne Smith Saturday evening.

Thanks again for all your help with our BIG BLUE projects.
We saw the images of the wings after the students returned
with the payload and they are stunning.

Amazing. In all aspects (even though we didn't break 100k), it
was a huge success. We truly appreciate all your expertise
and efforts to make our experiments successful.

- Suzanne

Thanks to everyone that supported the flight.