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A 'gas balloon' is any balloon that stays aloft due to being filled with a gas less dense than air or lighter than air (such as helium or hydrogen). A gas balloon may also be called a 'Charlière' for its inventor, the Frenchman Jacques Charles.

Contents

History

Gas balloons today

Records

Use on other planets

See also

References

External links

History

The first gas balloon made its flight in August 1783. It carried no passengers or cargo, and popped when it reached too high an altitude. Later that same year, (1 December, 1783) a manned flight was made shortly after the first ascension in a hot air balloon (and indeed the first recorded ascension by man in any flying device).
Gas balloons remained popular throughout the age before powered flight. They could fly higher and farther than hot-air balloons, but were more dangerous as they were usually filled with hydrogen gas (which, unlike helium, could be easily mass-manufactured). Gas balloons were used in the American Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars (to very limited extent), and throughout the 19th century by hobbyists and show performers such as the Blanchards.
Curiously, after flying to an altitude of over 3000 m on his first flight, Professor Charles never flew again.

Gas balloons today

Today, gas balloons are often filled with helium, which is non-flammable. Gas balloons are regularly used for high-altitude research (such as with weather balloons) and for record-breaking manned balloon flights.
Helium-filled balloons for scientific research have flown to altitudes more than 50 km above sea level, above Earth's stratosphere and into the mesosphere. Such balloons fly above over 99.9% of Earth's atmosphere and operate in near-vacuum. They are used to image the Sun and stars in ultraviolet or other wavelengths of light that does not penetrate the atmosphere, to detect weak cosmic rays or the cosmic microwave background, or to study conditions at the top of the atmosphere.
Current gas ballooning is quite common in Europe, primarily in Germany, where hydrogen is used as a lifting gas. The balloons are very special in construction and enjoy an exceptional safety record. The sport is now expanding in the United States, with both helium and hydrogen as lifting gases. But even as the sport is expanding, it is extremely small, with possibly only 20 or so active pilots in the entire United States.

Records

The altitude record for a manned balloon was set at 34.7 kilometers on April 5, 1961 by Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather in a balloon launched from the deck of the USS ''Antietam'' in the Gulf of Mexico.
The altitude record for an unmanned balloons is 53.0 kilometres. It was reached by a Fujikura balloon with a volume of 60 thousand cubic metres, launched in May 2002 from Sanriku, Iwate, Japan. This is the greatest height ever obtained by an atomospheric vehicle.^[1] Only rockets, rocket planes, and ballistic projectiles have flown higher.

Use on other planets

The Russian spaceprobes VeGa 1 and VeGa 2 abandoned two gas balloons with scientific experiments in the atmosphere of Venus, which could transmit signals for two days to earth.

See also

★ Balloon (aircraft)

★ Gordon Bennett Cup - famous long-distance gas balloon race

★ Tethered helium balloon - Static helium balloon in South Africa

★ Double Eagle II - first manned balloon to cross the Atlantic Ocean

★ Larry Walters - used a lawn chair and 45 helium-filled weather balloons to rise to

References

1. Development of a 2.8 µm film for scientific balloons, , Y, Saito, Advances in Space Research,

External links

★ Albuquerque Gas Ballooning Association Hosts of the America's Challenge Gas Balloon Race

★ Gas Ballooning.net - current information on the state of sport gas ballooning by gas balloon pilot Brian Critelli from Texas, USA.

★ Gas Ballon.be - Belgian site with good gas balloon competition information

★ Stratocat - Historical recopilation project on the use of stratospheric balloons in the scientific research, the military field and the aerospace activity