High Altitude Balloon NS1b Launched

We did it again. Tonight we launched our sounding balloon NS1 but this time we installed a night camera in order to study the illumination contamination while we take experience for the next launch towards the space.

At 1am (local time in Spain) we launched the NS1b in a place called Corral de Almaguer, near Madrid. At 6am we lost communications few minutes before the probe touches ground some where near Carboneras de Guadazaón village closer to the N420 highway. During the night, wind is strong in the lower layers but is mainly null in the stratosphere as you can see in the following picture taken inside the Moon2.0 simulator. The Moon2.0 is an open source platform to develop our home made launcher and to operate it when flights to the Moon.

In between, we reached 28740 meters (94,300 ft) of altitude and the trip was around 120 km (74 milles).

In the following picture you can see that there is a large difference between the predicted (Magenta) and the real flight (White) due to the strong wind in the night.