CloudLab Program

Program Overview

The goal of the CloudLab program is the design and construction of a family of reliable high altitude balloon vehicles capable of carrying payloads to the “near space” environment and permitting easy recovery of these payloads after a non-destructive descent back to Earth.  The primary use of the CloudLab vehicles will be to facilitate the testing of technologies for other CSTART programs in realistic environments, e.g.: testing inertial, barometric, horizon sensing and GPS navigation systems, testing parachute deployment systems, testing radio communication systems using realistic distances and atmospheric conditions, etc.  A secondary use may be for any space science related experiments which can be performed using the vehicles.

Program Stage Structure

• Stage 1: Minimal electronics payload featuring a GPS receiver and either amateur radio or GSM cellular network broadcasting of coordinates.  Will facilitate experimentation and experience with overall architecture and balloon filling, launching and recovery operations.
• Stage 2: More sophisticated electronics payload featuring GPS coordinate broadcast by amateur radio and GSM network (for redundancy) as well as onboard logging of data from basic sensors (temperature, pressure, etc).
• Stage 3: Twin payload system.  Primary payload consists of payload from phase.  Secondary payload is flight-specific and arbitrary.  The two payloads are connected via a cable.  The primary payload is able to log arbitrary digital data from the secondary payload, and the secondary payload is able to read GPS and sensor data from the primary payload.

Program Links

• Wiki page