After looking at the weather conditions for the next few days, the team members of Project GeoHawk have settled on launching our balloon at noon, Central Daylight Time, on Friday, April 8. So we can avoid the hassle of transporting heavy and potentially dangerous helium tanks, we will be launching from an open field behind Nichols Hall on KU’s West Campus:
Some weather forecasts show fog and cloud cover (54%-100%)for Friday morning, but we plan to meet at our launch site anyway. If the weather fails to cooperate, we’re going to launch on Saturday, April 9. The Saturday forecast is less than ideal (36%-60% cloud cover), but it may still work for our purposes, so long as the clouds are at a sufficient altitude.
The current launch prediction for Friday has us landing in the Grand Pass Conservation Area along the Missouri River near Wakenda, MO, which is about a 2-hour drive from Lawrence:
(from the Cambridge University Landing Predictor 2.0, http://habhub.org/predict/)
Three-dimensional Google Earth view:
(from the Cambridge University Landing Predictor 2.0, http://habhub.org/predict/)
We’ll be running one final launch prediction on Friday morning for the benefit of our chase team. Because we’ll have a very good idea of where our payload will land, the chase vehicle can set out as soon as the balloon is launched in order to shorten the total time needed for launch and retrieval.
- adam shanko - logistics team
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