Stratospheric air sampling balloon operation at antarctica

On January 3rd, 1998, a cryogenic air sampling experiment was carried out at Syowa Station (69S, 40E), which was the first successful trial in the world that large amount of stratospheric air up to 30 km altitude was collected over the Antarctic. This was also the first balloon payload recovery operation at the station. At Antarctica the meteorological conditions for launching and payload recovery are both critical, feasibility on wind conditions over the station was first studied in detail. Landing area was expected to be on sea ice for easy recovery operation by a helicopter. As the balloon launching operations had to be performed without a specialist of ballooning, facilities for launching, tracking, and other support systems were newly designed to be simple and easy to use. The configuration of the gondola was designed to install shock absorbers for recovery on sea ice. For an easy launching operation and a stable descending characteristic, a packed ring sail parachute was adopted. Realtime remote support from Tokyo, Japan, for the launching and flight control operations was applied using a computer network linked by INMARSAT.