Mele Kalikimaka

Merry Christmas to those up north. My apologies for not keeping this up to date. The internet has been pretty slow when I've had time to go on it. Now that ANITA is flying, I should be able to upload some more photos and work on the blog.

Here are some photos of the ANITA III launch. We scrubbed a number of times due to weather. The balloon launch requires low wind up to about 2000 feet. They would also like the wind to be blowing in a consistent direction up to that level. The wind also needs to blow in a consistent direction so they can lay out the flight train. Here they want things to be below 5 knots. It's also tough to predict the weather as it can vary dramatically over short distances and there aren't many weather stations. We had one attempt that had blowing snow as we came over the transition onto the ice shelf, but dead calm at LDB which is only about 7 miles away over flat ice. However the winds up at about 500 feet were blowing pretty good so we couldn't launch that day.

We generally showed up about 7-8 hours before the actual time of the launch attempt to start all the checkouts.

I'll see if I can get a video of the launch that I can share for those of you who weren't able to see it.

Here is the balloon right after release from the spool. The balloon itself connects almost directly to the parachute which is the orange thing in the middle. The balloon inflates as it rises due to the decrease in pressure as you go up. They have a collar on the balloon itself to make a "bubble".

The wind had shifted direction well before launch, but after they laid everything out so they knew they were going to be doing a bit of driving. It is always impressive to see. There are times they have to back up because the winds are so light, and times that they almost run out of balloon pad because the winds are so strong.

In this photo you can see the crew chief pulling the cable to release the pin that lets ANITA off of the Boss.

Our solar panels deployed flawlessly. I'll also see if I can get the video of the test of that in Palestine.

It flew just about directly overhead from where I was watching. After the incident in Australia a few years ago where a payload crashed into the vehicle that an unaffiliated photographer had parked at the edge of the launch pad even though he had been asked to move it, there have been many changes regarding safety. One of the more frustrating ones is the requirement that we be inside a building if the flight train is laid out pointing within about +/- 60 degrees of the viewing area. There was one scrubbed attempt that we were required to be inside the building for. I was glad we didn't launch that, but I know some of my coworkers would have liked to have been able to leave sooner.

Lastly, a photo of the remaining ANITAns at our Christmas dinner. I believe most of the others that were down here made it back North on Christmas Eve thanks to the crossing of the dateline. Dinner was delicious as always.