The weather delivered an unusual package to my house: a weather balloon observation package, complete with broken balloon and intact parachute, landed in the middle of my driveway.
I will bring it to the DMS tonight (Thursday) for interested parties to gawk at before packaging it up and mailing it back to the University which launched it.
I should be at the DMS around 7pm. Unveiling will be at 8pm on one of the the tables in the Workshop.
(the balloon is no longer inflated, so no danger here).
The people on the high altitude balloon project may want a look…
Looks like take out. Lol. Now introducing Amazon takeout. Delivered by balloon. Lol
that’s amazing. (and then more characters))
We should send them a thank you singed by members of the space along with the device.
And their payload. They generally include return shipping instructions, where they pay the shipper on delivery. These are our tax dollars being spent on those payloads…
nuh-oh. It’s all “free money”. 
there… edit for more explicit than implicit.
WAIT! We need to immediately contact them and ask if they’ll do some telemetry data for us on Sunday - around Plano.
@Brandon_Green give this thing a look over!
We’ve got an old radiosonde already on the shelf in the back. It’s not that relevant to our current design.
It is a little more interesting that they used hydrogen.
Did they use hydrogen, or did they just have a generic warning to keep people from messing with a partially filled balloon?
“may contain a flammable gas”
I mean, I guess that could just be a scare warning, but to me it sounds like hydrogen.
My guess is Hydrogen. Way cheaper, plus once launched and above ground, really no more human danger than the thing bursting and falling to ground (assuming not sucked into aircraft engine in flight). If there is a ignition, no real pressure for an explosion, just a quick almost colorless ball of flame for a second or two.
According to wikipedia you are correct… I would have guessed they would avoid hyrdrogen due to atmospheric static charges… Shows what I know…
The balloon will then lift our payload to the edge of space. However, as the balloon climbs higher, the pressure in the atmosphere decreases. … Lifting Gas - Helium isn’t the only gas that has less density than air. Hydrogen is another common lighter-than-air gas used by many meteorological organizations.
Intro to Weather Balloons – High Altitude Science
So there’s a chance that they went with hyrdogen. Might have been more cost effective for them.
