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The walkout.
In the background you can see the Burning Man festival being setup.

This is just a quick update. The mission is still in progress. We had a great flight. There were some very, very weird system issues in flight. All communication with the vehicle were great.

Away 35 landed on top of a range. Yesterday we got within 2.2 mile when our way was blocked by shear walls. We were free climbing and climbed through three waterfalls, however, we only cover a half a mile in three hours. Blackrock may look like it’s just a dusty desert, but if you get into the surrounding canyons there are deep pools, streams and amazing ravines with 300 foot high shear walls.

By the time we climbed out there wasn’t enough time for another attempt. Tomorrow we’ll be back. I’ll be approaching from the other side of the range. We got a tip from Bruno himself that there is a way in.

Three hundred miles East, ninety miles North,

then 24 miles straight up.

Here’s the lid to the main telemetry system on Away 35.

It’s the beat that keeps us going.

Away 32 just after lift off.

The view from a mission last spring.

The final camera test looks good. I won’t know for sure until I review the images. Seven camera, 409 images each all looking at clocks. It’s going to take a lot of David Bowie and Space Vacuum to get through that pile.

There was a glitch in the backup balloon release system. The computer reset when the release heater came on. This means it never got to the release itself. It looks like it was just a low battery issue coupled with the incorrect heater installed for the test. However just to be safe I’m going to do a modification on the circuit to “lock” the computer on. This does mean another round of testing today.

The helium tanks all got checked. The team is really good about marking the tanks as full, used or empty, however, I hate dragging empties to the desert so each one gets rechecked.

A lot of you have e-mailed in. I must apologizes for my delay in replying. I’ve fall just a bit behind. I will get back to you soon.

The laser experiment came through the last full duration test completely solid. On the test prior I used a low battery. Around data sample 200,000 very weird data started to appear. Unless the sensor power system was putting out the energy of Hover Dam something was very wrong. It turns out that when analog to digital converter (this connects the sensors to the computer) starts loosing power it doesn’t die, it just outputs bad data. I cost four hours of testing time but it is very good to know.
With all the troubleshooting Saturday we didn’t get a chance to do the full duration test on the seven flight cameras. That’s today’s task.

You always find things in the full “plugs out” test that never show up any other time. We had one glitch that we chased for a good part of the day and well into the night. When the GPS telemetry system transmits the balloon release system triggered. Now these systems are not connected or even touching each other. In fact they are not even on the same deck. After much very deliberate, one electron at a time troubleshooting the trail of events were revealed. The antenna cable was close to the still camera array bus cable. Power would induct, (yes, from a shielded cable) from one to the other cable and travel to the other side of the vehicle where the where it would induct into the balloon release cable. It would induct through the positive line of the camera cable and the negative line of the release cable. It only happens when the camera system is off and the main controller resets. The antenna was moved and all is well. We’re going to redo the test during the week to make sure.

We loaded at the antennas and stands on the mission control van and did some maintenance on the generator. When the antennas get loaded the mission really starts to feel close.

After pulling the sensor on the laser experiment we found some contamination. We cleaned it up and put it back. We put it through a two hour test run and it worked fine, however it failed during the full systems test. I’ll need to replace it after all. It’s going to be a very busy week.

I’ve just added two more tasks for tomorrow.

1. Replace target sensor on laser array experiment.

2. Reduce laser array firing time.

Oh well, at least it’s working.

Mesospheric Explorer

The Mesospheric Explorer series is designed to investigate the area of the world above 160,000 feet. Here is the prototype on it’s first flight about six years ago and another image with the “hood off”.

The Orbital Ascender