I'll be adding to this blog post in coming days. It appears as though balloons circumnavigate Antarctica all the time. Of course, there is no way for the ordinary person to verify this or-- if it's being done-- to verify time and distance. It's hard to imagine how a two or three ton payload can be lifted to 100,000 ft with a balloon anyway, given air density decreases as you rise. And at 100,000 feet, air density has to be pretty thin.
This liftoff of a possibly fake mission reminds me of the space jump done by the energy drink company awhile ago.
Here's my blog about the fake RedBull spacejump. I address a number of points that are valid with this NASA balloon over Antarctica.
http://redbullhoax.blogspot.com/
See INDEX below under "balloons... " for more posts about these balloons.
It's not just one balloon... but hundreds of balloons have been released.
Source: From Comments in another post...
Can we really believe that balloons have been released from all the following marked [in red] locations?
http://www.livescience.com/17599-research-balloons-antarctica-nsf-bts.html
[superimposed on the missing google hole,in part]
http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/022/925/i02/Figuretwo.jpg?1324504771
http://www.livescience.com/17599-research-balloons-antarctica-nsf-bts.html
[superimposed on the missing google hole,in part]
http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/022/925/i02/Figuretwo.jpg?1324504771
It doesn't seem possible that there could have been the sheer number of releases as pictured above. Imagine the cost for one thing. And the launches require crane trucks and other equipment. How is it possible that crane trucks can be all over antarctica? Note the missing hold part in the middle again on the Google photo... which appears quite distorted.
I think the original NSF article has rather paraphrased this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50246/full
Unprecedented upper-air dropsonde observations over Antarctica from the 2010 Concordiasi
See this image
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50246/full
Research stations are the familiar purple google tear drops.
Smaller colored tear drops are from the alleged drift of one sonde where driftsondes are budded off to give dropsonde locations.
It looks rather uniform, the pattern of yellow squares.. I'm not convinced, although allegedly there were 13 driftsodes used.
They collected 639 unprecedented pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind profiles from the stratosphere to the surface with high data quality, high vertical resolution, and large spatial coverage.
I guess these yellow squares are the drops from all 13 flights.