3/23/2023 0 Comments Physics 101 hot air balloonBalloons can fly much higher than airplanes, beyond the first layer of the Earth's atmosphere (up to 37 km or 120,000 ft high), which is high enough to see the Earth's curvature. Engineers and scientists often employ balloons to take atmospheric measurements or gather data in sensitive, dangerous or remote areas. This engineering curriculum aligns to Next Generation Science Standards ( NGSS).Įngineers apply the principles of buoyancy to design many useful items, such as boats and hot air balloons. Students use the aerial footage to draw maps and estimate areas. Applying their newfound knowledge, the young engineers build and test balloons that fly carrying small flip cameras that capture aerial images of their school. After their first attempts to create balloons, they are given the associated Estimating Buoyancy lesson to learn about volume, buoyancy and density to help them iterate more successful balloon designs. We’ll be watching the skies (okay, probably just the internet) to see when Leo’s first space launch - which still hasn’t been given a firm date - takes off sometime next year.Students follow the steps of the engineering design process as they design and construct balloons for aerial surveillance. It’s a wild-sounding idea, but there’s some sound science behind it. The system is designed to fit inside a standard shipping container for go-anywhere mobility, in keeping with Leo’s target for a “zero fixed-site launch infrastructure” that can deploy the system anywhere in the world. Leo explains on its website that high-altitude balloon launches can cut “energy requirements to orbit by over 10% and the overall size of the rocket by more than 50%,” while carrying a payload of up to 3,500 kg. A series of 2018 tests without a payload proved the theory was sound, and if next year’s payload test is successful, hot-air balloon launches could become a key way to lower the cost of entry for the dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller companies that seek to deploy micro-satellites for a variety of uses. But the new effort focuses on an angled trajectory that would make the balloons reusable - a big component of keeping the cost manageable. Those early tests involved the Air Force destroying the balloon by having the rocket shoot straight through it, in a vertical position, every time it was tried. But the rise in small satellites has created a huge demand tailored to these capabilities.” shifted toward sending people to the Moon - so there just wasn’t a need for that technology in the Apollo program. The issue they ran into was that the U.S. “It actually worked really well for what it was designed for. “We found this really elegant solution that was actually tested in a rudimentary way in the ‘50s by the Air Force, which is launching rockets from an aerostat - a balloon,” he said. Via TechCrunch, Rudy said at this week’s event that his company is evolving a concept that dates back as far as the early space age. Here’s Rudy in his Purdue student days, explaining the basics of the idea: But Leo co-founder Dane Rudy and his peers have been at this a while, and a test launch slated for 2020 should help demonstrate whether the concept is repeatable and cost-efficient - and, more importantly, that it actually works. Having a rocket use a balloon as its launch pad may seem like a physics-defying recipe for a giant, fiery mess at first glance. The system relies on massive hot air balloons (and no, not the creepy red kind) to do the dirty work of schlepping an unfired rocket through its first leg of the journey past the lower atmosphere, where breaking the confines of gravity becomes much easier and more fuel-efficient than pushing through the most air-dense part of the invisible gas sheath that blankets the planet. Tech startup Leo Aerospace hit the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield event this week in San Francisco to present its new high-altitude launch system, a blend of seemingly archaic flight tech with cutting-edge engineering. In a potentially inspired move (if it works), a Purdue University student project to leap the costly obstacles of putting small satellites into orbit has turned into a full-fledged company, one with the goal of launching its first real-life mission next year - not by taking off from Earth, but by firing up the ignition from 60,000 feet in the sky. Sometimes the lowest-tech solutions can trump the most far-out ones.
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