Characterisation of the flight chain for sounding balloon missions

The deployment of sounding and stratospheric balloons poses a substantial technological difficulty in characterizing the launch chain, which runs from the balloon’s nadir to the payload. This chain exhibits complicated dynamic characteristics such as pendular oscillations, longitudinal vibrations, and torsion movements and a thorough understanding of these events is required for an accurate determination of payload attitude during flight. Sounding balloons are increasingly utilized in numerous scientific initiatives, such as Earth observation projects, in situ atmospheric study, and microgravity simulations and lack of a comprehensive understanding of the chain’s dynamic behavior could undermine the functionality of onboard instruments like sensors, imaging systems, and inertial measurement units. This paper presents an experimental campaign aimed at characterizing the chain used prior to the launch of an experimental payload called AREO (Attitude Reconstruction and Earth Observation) and highlights a first qualitative comparison with the actual flight conducted following this characterization.