演講資訊

摘要：

The Balloon Facility of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR-BF) was established in December 1970 at Hyderabad. This is the only major balloon facility in the world close to the geomagnetic equator. Since its inception, the TIFR-BF has been launching zero pressure scientific balloons every year for the study of various scientific applications especially in the field of X-ray & Infrared Astronomy, Astrobiology, High Energy Physics and Atmospheric Science. The large variety of science disciplines studied using scientific balloons include the study of the Sun, the near Earth space environment - ionosphere, magnetosphere, aerosol research, space plasma and its physics & chemistry, interstellar dust and cosmic ray particles. A unique feature of the TIFR-BF is that it has all aspects of Scientific Ballooning, i.e., Balloon Design, Fabrication, Payload Integration with Telemetry, Telecommand and other instrumentation, and finally Balloon Launch, Tracking, Data Collection, Balloon Flight Control, as also Payload Recovery, under one roof. The balloon production at the facility is completely indigenous, i.e. balloon material, load tapes, end fittings, bonding tape have been developed in-house. In recent times, the TIFR-BF also designed and fabricated a balloon with carrying capacity of 3 tons with 4 layers of 25 microns, and also oblate spheroids of volume ranging from 10 m 3 to 100 m 3 for testing of newly developed satellite payloads in laboratory at different conditions. The balloon flight support instrumentation at the TIFR-BF has been regularly updated with several innovations and advanced instrumentation for safe and highly reliable flights. A continuous improvement in balloon flight support instrumentation by the Control Instrumentation Group to keep in pace with the growing complexities of the scientific payloads have contributed to the total success of balloon flights conducted recently. In this talk, I will present the details of the above mentioned developments and the future upgrade plans.