With the brief Antarctic summer approaching and the U.S. budget still uncertain, things at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine are a bit up in the air.
The NASA center in East Texas has three major scientific experiments on the schedule, and has already shipped its equipment to Antarctica. But its staff is grounded by budget uncertainties.
“One of our experiments is so complex and takes so long to reassemble and check out at the launch site that to have it ready between the 1st and 20th of December, we really need to be down there in the next few weeks,” said Danny Ball, site manager of the CSBF.
The first work crew from the balloon center was to leave for Antarctica on Friday, Ball said, to begin site preparation work at the McMurdo Station on Ross Island.
“Like everyone else, we’re just waiting,” Ball said. “We haven’t heard from NASA or the National Science Foundation,” which oversee scientific research on Antarctica.
“We haven’t been officially ‘stood down’ yet,” he said. “We just haven’t heard.”
John Hobbie of Palestine, who worked for the CSBF before his retirement and traveled to Antarctica for the summers of 2005-06, said a small staff remains there year-round, but work and housekeeping crews fly down in mid-October “to bulldoze runways and clear snow off the roofs” before the scientific teams arrive.
It’s a short season with a small window of opportunity, Hobbie said.
“You have all these scientific projects planned, and they’re heavily scheduled so you only have so many people down on the ice at a time,” he said. “So the logistics are important. Everybody gets a turn down there. But if you shut it off now, basically the whole year is gone.”
Lockheed Martin, the company that oversees the NSF’s Antarctic operations, said it will run out of money for the program by mid-October.
If that happens, Lockheed would begin evacuating all but a skeleton staff from the McMurdo, Amundsen-Scott and Palmer research stations on Antarctica, according to Nature magazine.
That would mean the CSBF’s balloons and their scientific payloads could be unavailable until next year, Hobbie said.
The CSBF has provided balloons for scientific experiments over Antarctica since the 1990s, Hobbie said, lifting heavy payloads “to the edge of space.”
The balloons themselves are remarkable, made in Sulphur Springs of clear plastic about the thickness of a sheet of kitchen wrap.
“They’re huge balloons, about 40 million cubic feet, and when we’re getting ready to fly them, they’re taller than the Washington Monument,” Hobbie said.
They are capable of carrying a payload 120,000 feet up, just short of 23 miles from the Earth’s surface.
“At that point, 99.5 percent of the atmosphere is below you,” Hobbie said. “It’s been laughingly called ‘the poor man’s shuttle’ because it carries the types of things that used to be hauled on the space shuttle.
“It doesn’t go quite as high,” he said, “but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.”
Researchers use the balloons during the Antarctic summer when the sun shines 24 hours a day, helping the balloons to maintain a reasonably steady elevation.
“We launch from McMurdo during December and January,” Ball said, “and at the elevations we fly, the balloons go in a counter-clockwise direction around the continent. We’ve done as many as three passes, and [the balloon] usually comes back just about to where we launched.”
Follow Michael E. Young on Twitter at @mikeyoungDMN.
IN THE KNOW/Meals on Wheels in Texas
The federal government shutdown won’t keep Meals on Wheels in North Texas from rolling. Thanks to private donations and volunteers, the program, which is run by the Visiting Nurses Association, will continue to provide 4,000 meals a day to seniors in 13 North Texas counties.
The Visiting Nurses Association provides programming and assistance toseniors in addition to the Meals on Wheels program.
Katherine Krause, chief executive of VNA Texas, said her organization has already been hit by sequestration. Though the number of clients will not be slashed, the waiting list is only growing longer. With the current funding, the wait time is about a year.
“It’s a crisis,” Krause said. “At 2,800 it’s the longest waiting list in our history.”