The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Small white balloon on a mission

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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Small white balloon on a mission

Staff Reporter

It will examine changes in atmosphere during solar eclipse on January 15

The experiment is being funded by ISRO
Test flight of the balloon held at MANUU

PHOTO: K. RAMESH BABU

Flying High: Students of MANNU preparing to conduct test flight of the balloon on Friday. —

HYDERABAD: On Friday morning, a small white balloon took off on a test flight from the sprawling lawns of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU). Any other balloon would have escaped everyone’s notice but this one was on a mission.

Its task was to investigate the changes in atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity and winds during the annular solar eclipse of January 15. Friday’s episode was the test flight for the final test.

“We will also investigate the generation of gravity waves during the eclipse,” principal investigator of the project Dr. Gopa Dutta of Anwar-ul-Uloom college said after the test flight.

Wholly funded by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the experiment will see Dr. Dutta and her co-investigator Dr. H. Aleem Basha of MANUU’s physics department gather germane data during the solar eclipse. They will be working in close collaboration with some of the leading scientific laboratories in the nation such as National Atmospheric Research Laboratory (NARL), Gadanki and Space Physical Laboratory, Trivandrum.

Explaining the significance of their experiment, she pointed out how few scientists have studied the lower atmosphere for gravity waves. “Most scientists work in Ionosphere. Gravity waves are generated mostly in Troposphere, which we will study during our experiment. In fact few papers on studies done at Troposphere level exists even in foreign countries.”

NARL’s Mesosphere, Stratosphere, Troposphere (MST) radar, the only one in the country will be operated for a couple of hours on all the test days as part of the experiment. “The MST data will help me pinpoint the gravity areas in the lower atmosphere. By combining these two data, we will try and investigate the gravity weight generation during the eclipse,” she said.

Three flights

There will be three flights on annular solar eclipse day, the first during the early hours, the second at 12 noon and the third at 3.30 p.m., said Dr. Basha. Special flights to collect controlled data to compare the parameters under normal conditions would be conducted two days prior to and after January 15.

The balloons have all been imported from Japan for the experiment while their payload consisting of ozone sound (that measures values of ozone layer) and GPS radio sound (that measures other parameters) were imported from the United States.

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