this post is ALL about the flight and the results of this mission... so... many of you have been wondering "why do they call it 'science disasters''? well... let me tell you: because the whole thing WAS a disaster! we got our launching position and everything was going to plan. Here are some pictures of the launch: So we tracked the balloon with the OTHER phone. so while we waited for the balloon to burst (3-6 hours) we used the extra helium from matheson to fill the gloves we were wearing to fill the balloon. :P we saw the tracking and after about 1 hour it was at 30,000 feet when it should have been at 50,000 feet. This was the last contact we got from the balloon. As you can see it has a continuous rise rate in the picture below, so it did not appear to be rising slowly because it was leaking, it may just have not had enough helium for some reason. One thing we noticed is that the phone battery was very hot at 116degF, maybe because it hadn't hit the super cold air yet. Even at this slow rise rate the balloon should have burst in 222 minutes and been back on the ground in less than 6 hours, easily within our 10-12 hour battery life. To say the least, the mission was a Science Disaster, and we lost all of the arduino and phone etc. RIP. Our theories on what happened: 1. The phone was shut down due to heat... 2. The lipo battery on the extra video camera could have exploded due to heat. 3. It could have been chopped up into hamburger by an airplane. 4. The balloon might have floated a long time due to not enough helium, and by the time it came down the battery was dead. 5. God kept the balloon. 6. Putin viewed it as a threat and had a satellite take it out. We hope someone out there finds our payload and visits this blog and calls the number on the box -- 313-805-2800 to return it for a nice reward! "It was a great experience" - Ezra. "That was the most disappointing day of my life" - Malachi "Malachi is always negative" - Ezra "It was fun" - Malachi "Stay tuned for our next awesome Science Disaster..." - The Team.
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We weighed the flight box with all final stuff in it, and it has come is quite light at 1125g or 2 lb 8 oz. This is great because we can achieve higher altitude. We re-ran the burst calculations and, sure enough, the balloon will rise much faster (4.33 m/s) at this lighter weight. 2 hours to burst at 100,00 feet. Neck lift of 1927 grams will be used to set a lift mass that we will use to make sure we have the right amount of helium. At the lighter mass, the payload will drop more slowly on our Rocketman 4 foot chute, around 13 ft/sec or 3.9 m/sec. With the new faster ascent, and slower descent, we ran the predictor for 9am Sunday morning and it looks like we will launch near Hillsdale MI and enjoy a 3 hour flight!!!
So we went to the place called Matheson on Middlebelt in Garden City (which you might remember from an earlier post) and bought some helium. the guys there were REALLY nice... in fact i bet one of the guys are reading this right now... ( hi! :D ) so we bought the helium canister and think we got the right amount of helium: 125 cubic feet.... So now all we need to do with the helium is find out HOW to get it inside the balloon... luckily the guy at Matheson had a balloon filler nozzle too.... so that's a bonus! But now we need to learn how to DO it... actually... i wonder why welding requires helium.... anyone know? what?! you think i weld?!?! well... i don't...
ok so we obviously dont want to land in a bad spot right? such as water, trees, and all that stuff! so we looked at google maps and found out trees are the dark areas and blue is... well, water see? the fields are the light patch in the bottom right corner and the rest is trees! So we looked at MI, and as you know, MI is all trees basically so we look around MI. we found nothing good in MI. the closest state to MI is OH, so we looked around and found a good place to launch and land. the problem is the drive is 3 hours away but a LOT of fun is coming out of it! we plan to launch july 07, 2016! we might send a video of it launching and when we find it so look for those future posts! we are super happy and cant wait! this is what the flight predictor predicted |
AuthorMalachi and Ezra's page where we build cool stuff and either break it, set fire to it, etc. in the name of science. Archives
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