In Google, reported on the results of Project Loon for 2014
On the official page of the Project Loon project on Google+, there was an interesting record about the results of testing balloons around the world, which engineers have been actively pursuing throughout the year. The main conclusion is that the resource of the balls allows them to be in the air for quite a long time without destruction, keeping their grouping sufficiently dense.
One of the main problems of the project is an aggressive environment, which has a significant destructive effect on the material that makes up the balloon envelope, and it’s difficult to imagine a situation in which Google will agree to regularly fill the falling devices. At the moment, the maximum duration of the ball in the atmosphere is 744 days - while the record was reached in the late sixties of the last century, and since then no one has even been able to get close to it. Although it is generally accepted that the normal resource of a balloon service is about 55-60 days, Google rather arrogantly stated that they hope to exceed this figure and reach the 100-day mark.
In reality, everything turned out to be even slightly better. The ball codenamed "Marathon Runner" was launched by a team of engineers in New Zealand in July of this year and stayed in the air for 134 days before landing in Chile. The collected statistics on this ball will allow in the future to reproduce this really significant success for the remaining balls Project Loon. It is curious to note the following reflection of one of the test participants: the smallest hole in the shell of the ball can significantly reduce its service life, and finding a hole in a 600-square-meter canvas is no better than finding a needle in a haystack. Reflecting on this problem, the engineer caught himself on a happy thought about condoms and the technique for detecting the smallest defects in them, and the decision was made. So, probably, it was this technique that helped to dramatically increase the life of the Marathoner.
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The following three balloons divided primacy among themselves in speed, resistance to low temperatures and flight altitude. It is noted that for the Sprint Star the speed was fixed at 324 km / h, The Frosty Survivor was exposed to temperatures of -83 ° C, and High-Flier reached a height of 25.8 km, which is about twice the height of civil aviation flights. In general, as you can understand, the project engineers consider testing to be quite successful, so one can hope for a real implementation of Project Loon soon.
One of the main problems of the project is an aggressive environment, which has a significant destructive effect on the material that makes up the balloon envelope, and it’s difficult to imagine a situation in which Google will agree to regularly fill the falling devices. At the moment, the maximum duration of the ball in the atmosphere is 744 days - while the record was reached in the late sixties of the last century, and since then no one has even been able to get close to it. Although it is generally accepted that the normal resource of a balloon service is about 55-60 days, Google rather arrogantly stated that they hope to exceed this figure and reach the 100-day mark.
In reality, everything turned out to be even slightly better. The ball codenamed "Marathon Runner" was launched by a team of engineers in New Zealand in July of this year and stayed in the air for 134 days before landing in Chile. The collected statistics on this ball will allow in the future to reproduce this really significant success for the remaining balls Project Loon. It is curious to note the following reflection of one of the test participants: the smallest hole in the shell of the ball can significantly reduce its service life, and finding a hole in a 600-square-meter canvas is no better than finding a needle in a haystack. Reflecting on this problem, the engineer caught himself on a happy thought about condoms and the technique for detecting the smallest defects in them, and the decision was made. So, probably, it was this technique that helped to dramatically increase the life of the Marathoner.
')
The following three balloons divided primacy among themselves in speed, resistance to low temperatures and flight altitude. It is noted that for the Sprint Star the speed was fixed at 324 km / h, The Frosty Survivor was exposed to temperatures of -83 ° C, and High-Flier reached a height of 25.8 km, which is about twice the height of civil aviation flights. In general, as you can understand, the project engineers consider testing to be quite successful, so one can hope for a real implementation of Project Loon soon.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/363931/
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