The aerial surveyor diaries
The team
Kathy Sykes's diary about the challenge for the Aerial Surveyor programme, from the BBC/OU series Rough Science 4
Day One
Building an "airborne Mars Rover" - hopefully it'll be easier than a Mars Rover stuck on the ground. We have black plastic bin bags and sticky tape, so we tried sticking bits together to make a giant cylinder and a giant sphere to compare.
It sounds so simple - the black plastic bodies will absorb the heat from the sun like crazy, get hot and rise. But the wind is a real issue; it always is in ballooning. I live in Bristol, a Mecca for balloonists. There's a world famous Balloon Festival there every year, but balloons can only fly when the wind's not too fierce. The wind whipped the cylindrical balloon to shreds - it looked mad, lashing about all over the place. So we focused on the spherical balloon, which was calmer in the winds.
By the end of day one, we decided we'd build a sphere - but it needed to be bigger.
Day Two
Since we're going to have to try flying our balloon in the early morning - to avoid the winds that pick up from about 8.00 am - we have to finish it today, to fly it tomorrow morning.
So we cut plastic, lay it on the ground and stuck it together. A lot of cutting, scrambling around on the floor, and sticking. Got covered in dirt. Covered everyone in dirt. Stick here, cut there. Finally, we manage to stick it all together and ... disaster. We stuck it together wrongly and it wasn't a sphere - it was a crazy thing with ears.
Cut it to bits and began again. More dirt, more sweat, more sticky tape ... it took hours.
And what do you know? We messed it up AGAIN! Just astonishing. Not enough time to do it again, and it was slightly better than before, so we decided to live with it (no choice really!). Ridiculous!
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Content last updated: 19/07/2006
