Vittascience Solar Balloon Kit

Construction time and balloon lifetime

In a classroom construction, the construction of the balloon itself lasts about 4 hours, with the students divided into different workshops (construction of the balloon envelope, layout of the gondola and connection and testing of the onboard electronics).

Be careful, the balloon can fly indefinitely but it is very fragile and must not be deconstructed and then rebuilt.

The flight is very dependent on the weather conditions

Before the flight, make sure that the weather forecast does not foresee any wind because the balloon can tear itself apart in case of a gust over 10km/h. We advise you to fly between 9am and 12pm, as the wind is generally weaker in the morning (the thermal winds have not yet lifted).

The time of the flight must be sunny for the balloon to take off very quickly, count about 5 minutes if it is lit by the sun. However, a slightly cloudy sky will be appropriate provided that you wait for a clearing.

Since the ambient temperature does not influence the flight, you can fly in any season (the important variable is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of the balloon).

See the weather forecast

Regulations during the flight

The balloon must be attached by the 50m ropes provided in the kit because the legislation authorizes captive flight up to 50m without authorization.

It will take you one hour to inflate the balloon, to fly it and to recover the data.

Experiments

You can measure temperature, pressure, altitude and pollution, all interesting data to observe and compare according to the flight zones!

It will take another hour to extract the data and draw the curves on Excel.

The collected data can be used to illustrate the physics of the atmosphere (variation of pressure and temperature according to the altitude), the detection of pollutants (CO2 by blowing on it, butane with a lighter...), the initiation to computer coding and many others..

Construction video