Nature
News: A NASA test balloon coasting in stratospheric breezes
around Antarctica broke the duration record for balloons this
week. It has surpassed a record set in 2005, when a balloon
carried a cosmic-ray experiment aloft for almost 42 days.
"It's been a superb flight," says David Pierce, chief of NASA's balloon programm at Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops facility in Virginia. "We're proving this is a viable platform." Balloon flights are a lot cheaper than satellites for conducting experiments, but the short time they remain aloft has been a drawback to long-term cosmic-ray and high- altitude atmospheric experiments.
This new balloon design suggests that a $50,000 balloon could replace a million-dollar spacecraft for short-to-medium-term research experiments.
