Possible NSL-93 flight 25-June

[Paul Lowell]

We have a group of students that are interested in flying.   Currently, the morning of Saturday 25-June looks like it might work for weather and jet stream. 

It has been a few years since we have posted anything this far in advance, so let's see how this goes.  Hopefully a few of you can get out of the house and join us in a safe chase.

Once we get closer to next weekend, we can narrow down the launch location.  Tentatively, let's say a set up around 8am (before it gets too hot) somewhere in RTP, followed by a launch with a hopeful landing about 2.5 hours later nearby.

-Paul, KD4BFP

[Jim Conrad]

Hi Paul, 

Nice to see you active again. I believe I can make it.

Thanks, 

Jim

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[Paul Lowell]

Most of my flights over the past year have been very time dependent -- Not something I can schedule with a group.   So this will be good to get a chase crew together again.

At this point the weather is still holding out for Saturday morning.  Today's models show that a launch north of Raleigh would land south of Fuquay.

[Paul Lowell]

Everything is still looking good for a flight tomorrow morning.

Current flight predictions are for a south-southwest track.  To increase our chances of avoiding landing in a tree (it is going to happen but we can at least try) then we should land southeast of Fuquay.  Working backwards from this, I've set the launch point in North Raleigh.  Considering the open-sky parks in this area with easy highway access, I've picked Horseshoe Farm Nature Preserve.   Some of you will recognize this as the site of some of NCNS' first launches.   I haven't been there in years, but its website states that it opens at 7am.  So I'm going to try there first.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/35%C2%B053'12.5%22N+78%C2%B032'04.2%22W

Plan is to meet-up with folks there at 0800EDT tomorrow morning.  We will prep for a launch before or around 0900.  This will put burst around 1035 over Fuquay, with landing south of Angier around 1115.

The flight may be tracked live at https://tracker.habhub.org/
The callsign will be KD4BFP, but as we have two trackers you may see two balloons listed -- depending upon tracker reception.  Habhub seems to have an APRS delay, so the KD4BFP-11 tracker may follow behind the actual flight.  You could also watch this on aprs.fi

[Tim Wiwel]

Paul:

Have fun.  I'm sad that I'll miss this one.   I launched my first balloon from that park.

Tim 

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[Jim Conrad]

Paul, 

Jill and I are on our way but running late. ETA about 0840.

73s. Jim N4WFP

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[Paul Lowell]

Awesome flight today!

A good group of folks showed up for launch today.  We assembled the payload and had balloon up around 0910ish.  Ascent was a bit slower than intended, so the track went further south than expected.  Burst was officially at 103,797 feet.   Lots of nice video from up there.  We can clearly see the coast of NC and lots of puffy 'happy clouds'. 

During descent, the on-board tracker kept insisting that it was going to land in a pond just south of the Cape Fear river.  A whole bunch of us were there watching as it did just that (That landing prediction software is excellent).

This was our first large group of witnesses of a landing.  And it was a splashdown at that.  It touched down, across the pond, about 30 feet from shore.  It continued to float nicely and over the next few minutes drifted to shore.

The land owners were awesome and just happened to run a water skiing school, so they had all sorts of boats and water gear.  Two instructors though just walked/swam out to the far shore and collected the payload.   Incredible!  We all have a cool story to tell about today.

None of the equipment or on-board experiments were harmed.   The antenna test worked great!  And the foam 'wing' really appeared to dampen the spinning of the payload.  Attached is an still from the landing video.   I'll be adding the write-up to the website soon.

Thank you Chris for being our Public Affairs Officer today and running the Tweetbooks!

[Paul Lowell]

Initial write up at 

https://sites.google.com/ncnearspace.org/home/missions/nsl-93