You see the auxiliary balloon already up, and the main balloon (that will become huge in the stratosphere) rising in the background and taking over. From Stephane Louvel, CNES. First flight for the @CNES balloons campaign #Klimat2021. The @HemeraH2020 gondola has been launched on Thursday at 21:18:35. All Twin experiments will analyze several climate components…

The gondola landed on 13-Aug around 5 am in a wooded area, and it was found and brought by helicopter to Esrange where our team was already waiting. We expected some damage, but it looked untouched, not even dirty. We proceeded to unload, check the equipment and data, and start the Aircore measurements that needed…

Update 1:00: And we did it, and it flew! The last few hours were intense, no time for blog. I will sleep a bit and try to be there at ~ 6 am when the recovered payload may arrive. But in short: after some small problems with the equipment, and some delay due to strong…

Today’s post is about one of my favorite pieces of equipment: the cryo-sampler. This is the device that will collect large stratospheric air samples from different altitudes, to be analyzed by all the participating labs for many gases and isotopes. The device is quite complicated, as you can see in the photos. But the principle…

We had a “NO launch” decision for today:  flight conditions were not very good (possibly wet) and  the after-flight recovery of the payload potentially difficult (low clouds, difficult for helicopter). The next good option seems to be on Thursday evening – we will have more info after the meteo meeting tomorrow.

It is a good moment to introduce the TWIN team. We are 15 scientists, from 6 institutions, from 3 countries. We have different expertise and will combine different instruments and measurements in one complex payload. Below is a short intro to the different groups and their contribution to this project, and one can find out…

In the last days the equipment has been installed and mounted in the TWIN gondola. We have in the flight package: several Aircores a cryosampler for large whole air samples (BONBON) a bag sampler (Big LISA) two optical instruments for in-situ measurements during flight (Pico-SDLA) … plus supporting power, electronics, communication etc   The gondola…

Yesterday we managed to get all our luggage, including the missing equipment! That was a big victory. Other than that, it was a really intense and long day of equipment installation. This is of course very technical work, but the result looks sometimes like art … here are some photo impressions. In the mean time…

We are in the equipment installation phase: the gondola and all the equipment have to be set up and mounted together. This is quite a big work, and has to be ready by the end of this week, because the possible flight window starts next week. Overall it goes well, and things start to take…

We (Elena, Sophie, Steven and Alessandro) are traveling to Kiruna, Sweden. More precisely, to the Esrange Space Center. This is, for us, the start of the long-prepared and long-awaited TWIN – Hemera campaign. We will meet there our colleagues from France and Germany – some of which already arrived some days ago to start the…