Balloons Project Loon from Google covered a distance of 3 million kilometers

It looked like a prototype balloon in January 2013

The Google Project Loon project for providing access to the network for residents of the most remote regions continues to evolve. At this time, the Project Loon balloons covered a total distance of 3 million kilometers (the total number of balloons involved is not reported).

The project is developing, the balloons themselves are being improved. If earlier one such “floating access point” was launched by a whole team with the participation of auxiliary equipment all day long, now it is much faster. One team can launch 20 balloons per day.

In the stratosphere, such balloons can now hang for months. Previously, the duration of the ball in the stratosphere did not exceed 10 days. Now this period has increased 10 times. The record is a permanent hovering in the upper atmosphere for 130 days. By the way, an interesting fact: in one Google balloon you need to download a volume of gas, which would be enough for 7000 ordinary balloons.
')

So launch balloons now

By the way, not so long ago Google corporation signed a cooperation agreement with Telstra communication operator in Australia . It is here that the operation of flying access points is checked, while Telstra provides the signal from the ball to the ground. To do this, the partner provides Google access to its base stations (working radio frequency spectrum - 2.6 GHz).



It should be noted that, according to the corporation, the balloons are almost impossible to hold in one place, due to the constant dynamics of the air flow. Nevertheless, the corporation experts have learned how to predict, and very precisely, the trajectory of the balloon. One of the balls covered a distance of 9000 km, while the end point of his journey was accurately predicted by the corporation's specialists even before the launch of the ball.

In general, so far everything is going well, and I would like to hope that Google and companies working on similar projects (Facebook, SpaceX ) will be able to quickly begin the practical implementation of plans.