In November and December of 2019 the Stratéole 2 team met in the Seychelles with plans launch 8 superpressure balloons and 5 scientific payloads. For all members of the Stratéole 2 team this campaign was aimed at testing our newly engineered instruments, flight command and environmental systems, and communications. The campaign more than met expectations with 8 successful launches and all instruments operational, with flights lasting more than 70 days. The team will apply the engineering and scientific lessons learned from this campaign to ensure successful science campaigns in 2021 and 2023.
Data from the Stratéole 2.0 campaign will be publicly available in late 2020. Some quick look profiles from the RACHuTS instrument are available.
instrument preparation tent CU-Boulder team arrive at field site CU team uniform field site RACHuTS final integration integrating the RACHuTS profiling unit view from the road final assembly of TTL3 gondola reel tests with RACHuTS and the TTL3 gondola Sergey and the TTL3 gondola Sean Davis preparing a water vapor sonde CNES team filling a superpressure balloon flying fox! FLOATS reel system and fiber optic cable FLOATS and the Zephyr on board computer moving the TTL2 gondola TTL2 team passing the FLOATS fiberoptics through PICO-SDLA Lars Kalnajs preparing a water vapor sonde TTL2 gondola final integration TTL2 gondola ready for flight TTL2 gondola pre-launch view of Mahé mountains from field site pre-launch