Building a stratospheric ballon.

Believe me when I say I tried to rotate the image

Some friends and I decided to built a stratospheric ballon. In the next post I will focus on the experiment we conducted at 28km of altitude, but on this one I will talk about the process of build. The take off was last week, so we are still analysing the results.

We calculated the trajectory with http://predict.habhub.org. Make sure to calculate the trajectory just before take off, beacuse the wind data changes very quickly.

Another important think is the GPS, a lot of people freaks out by it. If you do not have a good GPS, (our case) just put a old phone in the ballon with an app called CEBERUS, that let you see the GPS position of the phone! Oh, think about the battery. At -40 degrees Celsius, the phone battery is nearly non-existent, buy an external one.

There are a lot of guides on internet on how to build one of these but I want to give some personal tips:

– The walls of the porexpan cube have to be very thick, they will certainly break.

– What you think it glues on earth will not glue anymore at 28 km of altitude.

– Termic shielding! Shield all the electronics because of: Radiation and Cold.

– Think carefully of what kind of knot you will do on the helium ballon.

– Take with you a lot of duct tape.

After 6 hour of search trought a forest 200 km away from the starting point, we found the cube! :