As previously reported, PoGOLite - Sweden’s largest balloon-borne research project - was launched from the Esrange Space Centre at 1018 (local time) on July 12th. After some well deserved vacation, it is time to write a short report about the flight.
I’ll start with the ending - after a pioneering circumpolar flight lasting almost 14 days, the PoGOLite flight concluded on the Siberian tundra. The gondola was cut from the balloon in the early hours of 26th July and touched down by parachute approximately 1 hour later. The gondola landed near, but luckily not in, a lake. The landing site was close to the Siberian city of Norilsk which houses a large nickel and copper mine, as well as good infrastructure for a helicopter-based recovery of the gondola. Photographs provided by the Russian recovery team show that the gondola is in good shape. Recovery operations are still on-going with the ultimate aim of returning the gondola to Stockholm once customs issues are solved - hopefully during the next couple of weeks. While it was hoped that PoGOLite would make a full circumpolar transit and return to Scandinavia, the stratospheric winds were pushing the gondola too far to the North. The Esrange pilots did a fantastic job in keeping the balloon over dry land, but ultimately it would not have been possible to prevent the flight crossing into the Kara Sea and on to the Arctic Ocean. It was considered too risky to attempt a landing on Greenland, so the decision to terminate the flight was taken. We are now looking forward to the gondola returning to Stockholm since we need to access the arrays solid-state disks on-board in order to complete the scientific analysis of data. After some well deserved vacation, the PoGOLite team is now back at KTH and working with the data which we downloaded over satellite links (slow, but always available) and the excellent Esrange E-Link system (fast, but only work when the balloon is visible from Esrange). More news on what we discover in the future...
Mark Pearce
The PoGOLite landing site on the Siberian tundra.Credit: David Shifrin.
The PoGOLite circumpolar flight path. Credit: SSC.
On July 12th, at 0818 UTC, PoGOLite was launched from the Esrange Space Centre
