<p>Thousands of balloon-assisted meteorological sensor packages, known as radiosondes, are launched every day from various monitoring stations across the continental United States. However, only a small fraction of these instrument payloads are ever recovered, with most ending up as hazardous electronics waste strewn across the country. By creating a terrestrial landing system that could be retrofitted to common commercially available radiosondes, the landing survivability of these instrument payloads may be able to be improved. Furthermore, such a landing platform could also support continued meteorological data acquisition and transmission, allowing the radiosonde to transition from high-altitude monitoring to surface level sensor monitoring. Not only would such a terrestrial mission extension module fitted to a radiosonde drastically increase the potential utility of an existing radiosonde, but such a device could also improve radiosonde recovery rates, and therefore reduce the electronics waste being produced by regular weather balloon launches. Inexpensive radiosonde telemetry systems that are already optimized for collecting tropospheric meteorological data could therefore be repurposed to act as short-term terrestrial weather stations. For developing countries or areas without well-established ground monitoring meteorological stations, this would make an off the shelf radiosondes a potential interim solution for collection of both high altitude as well as surface level weather data. Additionally, strategic launches of radiosondes equipped with the mission extension module could allow for basic targeting of desired terrestrial monitoring locations. Thus, once the radiosonde had completed high altitude measurements, the instrument package might be able to be directed to a specific terrestrial location, where the extended mission time could be utilized to improve surface level meteorological monitoring. Retaining such a fleet of landed radiosondes equipped with mission extension modules might allow an area without the means for building complex meteorological ground stations, to still collect and analyze terrestrial weather data. It is also very probable that radiosondes equipped with the mission extension package would survive descent and landing intact, while maintaining the necessary telemetry downlink to help ensure that the instrument packages could eventually be recovered. And assuming that mission extension modules were constructed from commonly available and open-source hardware, such recovered radiosondes could be easily refurbished and reused in later missions. To further explore the feasibility of this design concept, a primarily 3D-pinted descent and landing system was developed and tested for use with a commonly available commercial radiosonde configuration. This experimental system focused on developing a mechanical landing platform that would act to absorb the shock of a parachute assisted radiosonde landing, while also ensuring that the correct orientation of the radiosonde could be maintained after the landing event. Of the shelf hardware and software were utilized to create a simple flight computer capable of data logging various telemetry sensors while also deploying the mechanical landing system prior to the landing event. Laboratory based as well as field testing of various versions of the system where also conducted with relevant data tabulated and analyzed to determine the effectiveness of the landing system. Laboratory experiments included stress testing through compressional loading of the landing system and integrated stability platform. Field testing included exhaustive drop experiments conducted from varying heights with multiple parachute sizes and configurations to simulate possible real-world application.</p>

Terrestrial Mission Extender for Weather Balloon Radiosonde

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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