Bristol physics students are up, up and away…

A team of University of Bristol Physics students has successfully completed a High Altitude Balloon Mission, sending a payload of scientific instruments and a camera to a height of more than 20km.  The student volunteer-led project is investigating  small particles suspended in the atmosphere that play an important part in the formation of clouds. 

The first launch, run as part of the Bristol student physics society CHAOS, took almost a year to complete, with team members participating alongside their undergraduate and postgraduate studies.  The ‘Dust Project‘ mission was funded by a Nexus grant from the Institute of Physics and donations from the Royal Meterological Society and the Aerosol Society.

You can watch a VIDEO of the launch and see more pictures taken from the balloon here:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Npbv93YIo

The Launch Team

The presence and composition of upper-tropospheric aerosols are of particular topical interest due to their impact on ice nucleation in this part of the atmosphere, where cloud formation has a strong impact on climate, but is poorly understood. As part of the same mission the standard atmosphere model was tested and photographs taken throughout the balloon flight. Careful planning and research was required as none of the students had any experience of helium balloon launches.

As the summer exams came to a close, construction of the payload began. A GPS module, radio, digital camera and microprocessor, kindly contributed by mBed, were programmed and contained within a polystyrene chilled food box strengthened with copious amounts of duct tape. Temperature, humidity and pressure probes were connected, and an aerosol collection device was attached to the outside.

The successful launch

In August the team travelled to Cambridgeshire to launch the balloon. The final preparations were made and a parachute attached. Using three cubic metres of helium, the 1.6kg payload was lifted to an altitude of 20.6km before the balloon burst as the planned means of achieving descent.

During the flight, the location of the balloon was tracked by the chase car as it crossed East Anglia, and the payload was safely recovered, 93km away!  Almost nine hundred photographs were brought back, along with data from the sensors and the carbon pads bearing aerosols.

The view from the balloon

Temperature and pressure data corresponded well with the standard atmosphere model. The collected aerosols were examined in the laboratory using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). It was not possible to obtain quantitative results in the available time but a successful initial investigation showed that it was possible to identify the chemical composition of microscopic particles collected on the carbon pads.

Future missions by the Bristol team are planned, with aims to investigate the possibility of sustaining a balloon at a given altitude whilst experiments are performed.

More details of the groups plans can be found here: www.bristolchaos.co.uk/UKSEDS/chaos-astrium.php.  You can read another short report about the launch here: http://ukseds.org/chaos-astrium-dust-project-report/