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Hot humid summer day. NSL-94 launched the morning of 14-July 2024. In the intervening two years since the last public flight, a whole new array of software and tracking had been rolled out. A new Habhub site had been released. The group from NSL-93 had some additional experiments to try; so time for another flight.
The payload consisted of a ~19cm plastic box. Nestled in black foam inside was:
Mobius Mini camera with small power bank
GMC-320 recording Geiger counter
AP510 APRS tracker
TTGO Tbeam 434MHz LoRa tracker with wire 1/4 wave ground plane antenna
some near-space exposure experiments
Outside was another large "wing" of Styrofoam; so all-in-all, a very similar flight to NSL-93.
Matthew, Sarah, and Paul L. met up with the NSL-93 group at Lake Wheeler Park, south of Raleigh. It was to be a very hot day, so they started at 0700EDT with hopes to launch by 0800EDT.
After a safety briefing, the 800g payload was activated and a 600g cell was filled with 1800g of lift from H2. Liftoff was at 0754EDT with a predicted flight path due east, then back west over the launch site. It might be possible to land very close to the launch site!
The entire flight stack at launch
Lake Wheeler moments after launch -- A very hazy summer day.
View south of Lake Wheeler
NC 540 construction
Like NSL-93, ascent was slightly slower than planned. This moved the landing site a few kilometers east of the launch site. The 'wing' again produced nice stable video. The LoRa antenna fron NSL-93 continued to work very well. Its tracker consistently reached out to Paul's chase car receiver as well as a stationary receiver at his home in Apex. Sadly, Paul forgot to reset a flight-mode setting prior to launch, so the LoRa tracker did not enable the high-altitude mode in the GPS. This caused the LoRa GPS to report the same Lat/Long/Alt during the upper half of the flight. Thankfully the AP510 APRS tracker worked flawlessly.
31km up there were storms off of the coast of Charleston, SC. And others forming off the coast of NC.
Swinging around just prior to burst at 31.2km
Burst and tumble
As a projected 2 hour zig-zag flight with a landing very near by; there was little need to drive to get out in front of the payload. The chase teams hung out, grabbed breakfast, and tried to stay cool.
Paul attempted to view the balloon as it traveled back overhead, perhaps to even record it with a smart telescope, but the haze made it impossible to see the white balloon against the practically white sky.
After burst, the chase teams leapfrogged neighborhoods to the east. For a tense 10 minutes, the landing predictions kept suggesting touchdown on I-40! Thankfully the payload drifted under chute a kilometer further east towards a housing development.
Paul's chase crew watched the payload come down nearby, but their street didn't connect. Four minutes later, all of the chase teams converged on the correct street. The payload sat at the front door of a home, with the parachute on the roof.
No one responded to the doorbell, so the chase crew collected everything and moved on to a local air-conditioned space to open the payload and review the video.
Flight visualization
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