Sounds like a really nice job! do you have probes, sensors, ect in the boxes under the baloon?
Yes. The top box is R.E.H.A.B.S, the Re Engineered High Altitude Balloon system. It carries some sensors (temperature and the like), radios to radio us on the ground its GPS coordinates, it has a few cameras, a cutdown system incase we need to separate from the balloon prematurely, and ports to add experiments (on my flight we tested some igniters for the rocket). The other boxes below were from the lab, each carried a camera, GPS, datalogger, and an experiment (ours had an accelerometer, one had some strain gauges, don't remember what the other one had)
Do you have to obtain permission, and clearance, from the various Aeronautical and Weather Authorities before you release the Balloon, and keep in constant touch with them during the exercise, for flight activities in the area?
...and how do you deflate the Balloon and recover the apparatus legitimately?
Paul...observing the Power, and Telephone lines in the distance!... ... ...!
If the payload is under 15 pounds, we don't need special permission from the FAA. When we launch the rockoon however we will need various clearances. We send out a NOTAM to alert pilots that there will be a balloon in the air. As far as weather and such, it's all a judgement call on our part. technically we shouldn't have launched that particular day, too cloudy, but oh well.
Deflating the balloon is close to what we do, actually as it climbs and the pressure gets lower the balloon expands (from being about 6 feet across to near 20) and eventually it pops! The blue and pink thing between the balloon and the payload is our parachute. The payloads fall with the parachute (and burst balloon) for a few thousand feet when the air finally starts to thicken enough so the parachute can actually create enough drag for it to slow down. We track it using GPS coordinates radioed to us from REHABS, eventually it lands somewhere and we use GPS compasses to find it. With the flight my payload was on it landed about 15 feet from a pond on some guys farm, and a flight the next weekend landed in a flooded area, someone found it and called us (we couldn't get to it), and we just actually heard from him a few days ago, we are going to pick it up this weekend and unfortunately he said he looked at the pictures on the camera and 'there were some cool underwater pics' which could be a very bad sign...
by Jayhawk Jake » Thu Sep 03, 2009 11:29 pm 
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i would love to do that in my backyard or something 
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