Mumbai : Come May, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), is all set to send human beings into near-space, or the stratosphere, in a balloon. Already, in March 2015, the country’s premier fundamental scientific research institute, in a first of its kind effort, has sent three lab rats enclosed in a space capsule up in a balloon.
This was in collaboration with a Singapore-based research firm, InGenius. The May effort is also in collaboration with the same firm, said, Prof Devendra Ojha, chairman of the TIFR Balloon Facility and senior scientist at TIFR’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The balloon carrying the rats went up to a height of almost 30 km, about three times that of Mt. Everest in a pressurised capsule. The animals were in space for about 110 minutes. The feat was recently recognized by the Singapore government as the top most scientific feat of the last 50 years during that country’s 50th independence day.
So far only the United States and Japan have sent balloons this high into the atmosphere but not with live animals and only with a payload of 10 kg, Ojha said. Prof Ojha told the Free Press Journal that the May experiment is slated to take a human being all the way into the stratosphere, up to a height of around 40 km and is expected to stay up for 6-8 hours.
“We have been working on sending higher payloads into near space, especially on plastic materials which are used to make the balloons, for quite some time now,” Ojha said. The institute is also working on developing the appropriate gear to meet the atmospheric conditions at that height.
The TIFR-InGenius researchers had tried to send a man into the near space last August too, but had to give up the idea because of adverse weather conditions.
TIFR’s balloon facility is popular in the scientific fraternity on account of the complete solution it offers in terms of balloon design, launch and recovery. The institute has been working in the field since the time of Dr Homi Bhabha, i.e., the 1950s.
TIFR provides the balloon and collaborates in designing the space capsule, life support system, telemetry, etc. TIFR designs and develops scientific balloons used for various atmospheric research projects. Scientists use these balloons to study among other things the behaviour of monsoon winds, astronomy and astrophysics experiments, Ohja said.
In one of the experiments, Prof Jayant Narlikar of Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, sent up balloons to see if micro-organisms could be found in the upper atmosphere as part of an experiment to see if life could be sustained in space. He is slated to repeat the experiment later this year.
