First Antarctic Solar Weather Balloon Flight
The first 100% solar weather probe, named Ballon ORA, was launched from the French Antarctic Dumont d'Urville Station in January 2011, by a joint team of students, scientists and engineers. The idea was to assess the feasibility of using solar balloons as probes in remote area, where saving the use of lifting gas, helium or hydrogen, would be precious. The flight was a success, approaching 46,000 ft (14,000 m). The savings do not only concern the lifting gas in itself. The ORA Balloon alleviates the need for the transportation, in and out, of the heavy gas canisters.
Read more about this topic: Solar Balloon
Famous quotes containing the words solar, weather, balloon and/or flight:
“Senta: These boats, sir, what are they for?
Hamar: They are solar boats for Pharaoh to use after his death. They’re the means by which Pharaoh will journey across the skies with the sun, with the god Horus. Each day they will sail from east to west, and each night Pharaoh will return to the east by the river which runs underneath the earth.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When I am on a stage, I am the focus of thousands of eyes and it gives me strength. I feel that something, some energy, is flowing from the audience into me. I actually feel stronger because of these waves. Now when the play’s done, the eyes taken away, I feel just as if a circuit’s been broken. The power is switched off. I feel all gone and empty inside of me—like a balloon that’s been pricked and the air’s let out.”
—Lynn Fontanne (1887–1983)
“One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)