High Altitude Ballooning – Imperial College Space Society

High Altitude Ballooning

Project Stratus – Developing cost-efficient and versatile alternative to Earth observation imaging satellites using weather balloons.

Hi everyone! We are extremely excited to announce that this year at Imperial College Space Society, we are launching Project Stratus, our new High Altitude Ballooning project! Project Stratus aims to build a multi-purpose weather balloon that can navigate itself horizontally through the stratosphere. We will achieve this by controlling Read more…

By Ivan Revenga Riesco, 2 months2 months ago

High Altitude Ballooning

Launch of balloon ICSPACE25

ICSPACE25 was launched from Felixstowe on 30 April 2021 by Steve Randall(Many Thanks). It was a twin balloon launch, both prestretched to 0.16 cubic meters over the course of 28 hours at ~0.6 psi. It floated at 10.8 km altitude, lower than expected. It uses the same tracker design as Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 2 years2 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

ICSPACE23 launch

ICSPACE23 was launched at 12:00h UTC on 17/12/2020 from Felixstowe, UK. It is once again a LoRaWAN tracker connected to The Things Network. Day 1 Here is the launch video, filmed by Steve Randall. Many thanks to Steve for launching it. At the end of the day, the balloon reached Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 2 years2 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

First (unconfirmed) circumnavigation of the Earth by IC Space Society balloon: ICSPACE22

ICSPACE22 was launched Monday 19 October 2020 with a 6.0g tracker under a party balloon filled with pure hydrogen. The tracker is solar powered and transmits LoRaWAN packets of its position to gateways connected to The Things Network. The balloon made an appearance over Japan 6 days later, and Canada Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 2 years2 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

ICSPACE21: Flight to Japan and ICSPACE20

This article describes two high altitude balloon flights in August/September 2020. ICSPACE20 was launched on 22 August 2020 and was last heard over Denmark. ICSPACE21, launched on 4 September 2020, was last heard over Japan six days later, floating at 10400m altitude. This is our longest flight in terms of Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 2 years2 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

Launch of ICSPACE19 LoRa balloon flight

The ICSS balloon group launched ICSPACE19 from Fryent Country park on 17/3/2020. This launch comes more than a month since the last launch and is perhaps the most tested tracker we have launched. The LoRa radio transmitted using Spreading Factor 8 and 125khz bandwidth. We have split the world into Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 3 years3 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

LoRa Balloon flights to Austria and Slovakia

The High altitude ballooning group launched 2 trackers on Friday 31 Jan 2020 from Fryent Country park. ICSPACE16 was last seen over Austria while ICSPACE17 landed on a hill in Slovakia and was transmitting until it ran out of battery. ICSPACE16 was our first pure solar tracker, with 6 solar Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 3 years3 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

Long range LoRa Balloon tracker launch from London

The long awaited launch of the our next generation balloon track has come. This new tracker integrates the Murata CMWX1ZZABZ-078 LoRa radio module, an Ublox GPS, TE connectivity MS5607 temperature/pressure sensor, AA lithium battery and boost coverter. We launched the balloon from Fryent Country Park, London in the afternoon of Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 3 years3 years ago

High Altitude Ballooning

Balloon flights to Poland and Germany

On 5th of August 2019 we launched our most successful flights so far, both in terms of distance and flight duration. ICSPACE13 travelled over 1200km to Poland, flying over the Netherlands, Germany. Flight time was 13h 2min. ICSPACE12 and 13 were launched around 5.30pm on the 5th of August from Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 4 years4 years ago

Events

New pico balloon flight duration milestone reached

The Imperial College Space Society High Altitude ballooning group launched 2 balloons yesterday, 15 April 2019. One of the two balloons launched yesterday was tracked for a duration of 12 hours and 52 minutes of flight time. This is our longest flight yet, beating our previous record by nearly 3 Read more…

By guilds_icseds, 4 years4 years ago