Free-balloon borne meteorological refractometer

Balloon - Borne Radio Altimeter

This work describes an accurate pulse radar altimeter which is simple and light enough to be carried aloft by a regular sounding balloon. The altimeter uses a single superregenerative stage serving as both the receiver and the transmitter. This stage is used in a feedback system in such a way that the period between transmitted pulses is a measure of altitude. The relatively slow rate of change...

Balloon borne 19 GHz radiometer

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope

We present the first results from a new 250, 350, and 500 m Galactic plane survey taken with the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) in 2005. This survey’s primary goal is to identify and characterize high-mass protostellar objects (HMPOs). The region studied here covers 4 deg near the open cluster NGC 6823 in the constellation Vulpecula (‘ 1⁄4 59 ). We find 60 compact ...

Balloon-borne tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer

A balloon-borne tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer capable of in situ measurement of the concentrations of several stratospheric trace gases simultaneously in the same parcel of air is described. Laboratory tests show present detection limits of 1.5 ppbv for NO and 0.5 ppbv for N02 under stratospheric conditions. This instrumentwas flown in July 1983 to make the first tunable diode las...

A balloon-borne accelerometer technique for measuring atmospheric turbulence

A weather balloon and its suspended instrument package behave like a pendulum with a moving pivot. This dynamical system is exploited here for the detection of atmospheric turbulence. By adding an accelerometer to the instrument package, the size of the swings induced by atmospheric turbulence can be measured. In test flights, strong turbulence has induced accelerations greater than 5g, where g...