ShareThisBy SUE VORENBERG
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
A gigantic, pumpkin-shaped balloon floats alone over the red, rocky landscape, scanning the surface for geology, water and signs of life.
It's not a new Halloween special shape at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. It's a vision of ballooning's future on Mars, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
NASA has been testing balloon designs like the big pumpkin at Fort Sumner since the early 1990s in hopes of taking ballooning to the next level: space exploration.
New types of balloons could be especially helpful in exploring planets such as Mars and Venus, because they float in areas that other craft can't reach, explained Magdi Said, a senior materials scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Virginia, who came to the balloon fiesta to help explain the science to passersby.
"It covers an area in the atmosphere that rovers can't go, and it covers an area much lower than our satellites orbit," Said said.
The agency is showing off its ballooning ingenuity this year in a tent at the fiesta.
NASA's balloons aren't all about other planets. They also have a more terrestrial purpose _ it's cheaper to launch a balloon than a satellite to study Earth's upper atmosphere, said Robby Estep Jr., NASA's balloon operations manager, also from the space flight center in Wallops Island, Va.
"The big thing about balloon science is that it's low-cost access to space," Estep said. "Scientific ballooning is kind of a gem that's often overshadowed by bigger, more expensive programs."
The scientists couldn't give exact numbers, but said it was several times cheaper to launch a balloon than a satellite.
It's cheap enough that NASA each year launches student projects designed by kids from kindergarten through college, Said said.
"The students are very innovative," Said said. "They fly seeds, products. One student flew ketchup to see if it would taste different after being in space."
NASA's balloons probably wouldn't be something balloonists at the fiesta would recognize.
They're filled with gas rather than hot air. And they're big _ very, very big, Estep said.
"You can fit almost 200 Goodyear blimps inside one of these balloons," he said.
The balloons cover about 22 acres when spread out, requiring about 20 miles of seams, Said added.
The gas-filled balloons rise to between 120,000 and 130,000 feet, above 99 percent of the atmosphere.
When NASA isn't launching students' projects, it sends up scientific equipment that investigates all sorts of things _ including cosmic rays, the durability of space instruments and distant galaxies, Estep said.
But there's room for improvement, according to Said. He said scientists and engineers are looking at three main areas to improve their ballooning:
They want even bigger balloons that can carry more scientific equipment.
They want balloons to be in the air for an extended duration _ most flights now last three days to a few weeks. The longest flight Estep remembers was 42 days.
They want to be able to control where the balloons fly.
"Like the balloons in the fiesta, it's not an exact science where they're going to go," Said said.
