Balloon Launch Summary for 10/22/2016
- Admin
- Oct 27, 2016
- 2 min read
This email was sent out by Marissa Saad:
Good afternoon everyone!
We had a great balloon launch this past Saturday! Thanks to everyone who participated or gave their support! We launched a 600 gram balloon at 10:45 am, reached about 85,000 feet, and arrived back in Grand Forks at 7pm. Yes, 7 pm!
Even though we ran multiple flight simulations, the balloon had a mind of its own and traveled over 100 miles, landing in Puposky (Mud) Lake. We were only 10 miles north of Bemidji! The Space Studies chase team was great; everyone remained calm and patient. We knew exactly where the payloads were, but we were unable to reach it. Our payloads landed in the center of this lake, floating around in the same spot for hours! We couldn’t swim the mile-long-journey to the center of the lake, and the lake was encircled by private property and uninhabited houses.
We reconvened outside of a gas station, discussing our options. We had almost given up, thinking we’d return Sunday with a kayak. But our luck changed! Sophie Orr walks out of the gas station with a lady who happened to own half the land in our area! This nice lady let us borrow two of her kayaks and her father-in-law’s pickup truck. We drove to the northwest boating dock, where Chris Buelke and I rowed out about a mile and a half to the lake’s center where we found the payloads!
This was a training launch, preparing our team for the upcoming Near-Space Balloon Competition (NSBC), which has 9 teams flying! A tremendous thank you to everyone who came on the launch, their patience and logical decision-making skills was truly appreciated.
I’ve attached some pictures in this email, but you can see more here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1MydfdSRLUZWW5oU1pEb3FDZlU?usp=sharing (please let me know if the link doesn’t share properly)
Can’t wait for the next launch!
-Marissa
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