A day in HARBOR

that's High Altitude Reconnaissance Balloon for Outreach and Research

It began last night, when deciding not to have a slumber party at WSU I just showered and went to sleep in my clothes to facilitate a 2:30 ish wake up time. Because the team had to meet at WSU by 3:30 am to depart for Duchesne, Utah, about a 3 hour drive. The whole drive was dark, cold, cloudy, and rainy, much to our dismay, but it's a darn good thing we didn't turn back because once we came out of the canyon and as the sun came up all those things disappeared. It was a perfect day to fly a giant helium balloon! After some hot cocoa and donuts at the airport we had a hurried balloon worshipping session (that's just what it looks like as we steady the thing while inflating it with helium) and got it off into the atmosphere before 9am so the FAA couldn't have a fit with us.

We then drove to Roosevelt, where there is conveniently located a satellite of, well, Utah State University, but it's okay because one of their staff and a student were with us. Still was fun to parade in there with all our purple shirts on. The computer people watched it with their computers, and some of us watched it with our eyes, until the GPS transmitter (aka BATS) indicated the thing was now falling back down to earth (after reaching a height above 92,000').

I guess they did a quick flight prediction and found a bunch of Google maps in the area we thought it would land and started driving that way. So after this, we stopped receiving data from BATS long before the thing hit the ground. That's bad. There was a lot of communication that tried to happen but mostly succeeding by way of MY cell phone, which included new flight predictions, good and faulty GPS locations, and shortage of maps in the actual fall zone to name a few. Some of us met up and we tried to chase the other group but with such limited communication out there in the Utah wilderness it didn't work well.

We ended up an hour down this dirt road with still no sight or GPS of the equipment, when what happens but one of the trucks dies. This is also bad. Cell phone coverage was sooo sketchy someone suggested we try texting, which did work, and we asked for some phone numbers to get a tow truck. Although what ended up happening was (eventually) we went to the Ford dealership in town and gave them the GPS coordinates of the truck we left in the wilderness and they'll go get it. We reorganized ourselves into 2 cars and shortly thereafter who do we meet on the road but the other chase group! They also had no sign of the equipment and said they'd keep looking for a few hours.

We went back to town and then to the airport to move the equipment trailer when what do we realize the trailer keys were still in the truck . . . oops. It's okay. We then proceeded to Heber where we had a nice Mexican dinner (thank you!) and then on home. The other group called while we were eating and said they were unable to locate the stuff or ever get a GPS transmission from BATS. So we have a pretty big area to search where it could have landed (although one [very unlikely] explanation why it stopped after 11,000' is that it unwonderfully happened upon an airplane) and someone realized somewhere that we didn't actually put the "please return to WSU" labels on anything . . . oops again. A friend from the airport will do a flyover tomorrow and team members are willing to go back up another day, like Saturday, to go looking again. But if anyone happens in the Utah wilderness off of U.S.88 past Ft. Duchesne and finds a couple boxes with a parachute, please return to WSU!

Hence
Launch: check.
Flight: check.
Landing: uh, hmmmm.
Recovery: definitely UNcheck