Home Profile Projects Consulting Press Employment Contact
 
 
 

Constellation Management

 
Uncontrolled Network

This page includes a movie that shows the trajectories of 100 balloons floating in the natural winds at 35 km altitude. On this page and following pages (see links at bottom), each balloon is shown as a red dot. Tails extend behind the balloons for 3 days, and alternating black and red colors indicate one-day intervals. All balloons are held at 35 km altitude for the duration of the simulation. All simulations start at 1992-11-10T00:00:00 and use the UKMO assimilation environment.

All simulations start with the same initial, randomized network where every balloon has at least 1.5x106 m separation distance from its nearest neighbor. There are 4 hours of time between frames of the movies.

This 120-day free-floating simulation shows that voids and clusters of balloons appear, indicating the need for coordinated trajectory control of individual balloons.

 

 

 

Note that QuickTime® is required to view these simulations.
You can get QuickTime® by clicking the button below