Unfortunately the weather never cooperated again this season so the Antarctica Balloon Campaign for the austral summer of 2015/2016 has officially ended. This has actually never happened before - usually they launch all of the missions in a season. NASA and NSF have decided to let us try again next season. So for the past few days we have been busy taking everything apart again and securing it in our payload building to spend the long cold winter here. There are some things we have packed to ship home since they will not survive the extreme cold. For the most part however, we are keeping the gondola and the instrument here. We do not know who will be on the team that comes back next season at this point, but they will put it all back together and try to launch in December. So it was a very disappointing end to this launch season. At least GRIPS was able to launch and seems to be having a very successful mission this season.
In other news, the U.S. Coast Guard's ice breaker ship arrived last week to break up a path for the resupply cargo vessel and fuel ships to come in. Right now the whole town is in the middle of "vessel offload" so there has been an influx of people arriving here to help with that. There are forklifts and sea containers all over the place as they spend the next week or so getting all the supplies into town and loading the ship up with cargo going back to the North.
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The GRIPS mission has finally launched! The very marginal weather conditions held out just long enough for them to get off the ground. Congratulations to the GRIPS team! You can follow their progress here: http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/antarctica/payloads.htm
We are waiting to see what the weather holds for us tomorrow and in the coming days. This has been uncharacteristically bad weather here this season. This is the latest they have ever launched a balloon. We are running out of time before the wind circulation in the stratosphere starts to deteriorate, which means there is a chance we won't launch at all. Everyone is still holding out hope that we will make it off the ground this season though!
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