NASA's Super Pressure Ballon successfully launched

[Desinishon]

NASAtoday successfully launched its football-stadium-sized,super pressure balloonfromNew Zealand, that will help detect cosmic rays from beyond our galaxy as they penetrate the Earth's atmosphere.The mission will run for 100 or more days floating at 33.5 km in the southern hemisphere's mid-latitude band."Following our 2015 and 2016 New Zealand missions, we've learned key lessons on the balloon design that have gone into perfecting the technology for this year's flight," said Debbie Fairbrother, NASA'sBalloon Programme Officechief.

Source
There are 3 balloons that has been launched including this one. 1st one lasted 46 days I think. I don't know how much long 2nd one lasted but I sure hope this one lasts full 100 day and achieve it's goal to fly from an even higher altitude on the ISS to observe a greater atmospheric area for detecting high-energy cosmic rays. ^.^

 

[Legobricks]

Balloons are difficult to not successfully launch, just fill it up and let it go on a nice day. Looks from their site like they had to wait a long time for that nice day though. It would be nice if balloons could be used more, if only they were controllable, because they would space space launches very cheap. That said, there are a number of private operators of Aerobee-style solid rockets that aren't expensive anyway, only problem with them is that they undergo accelerations in excess of 30G iirc.

One of the more fun (read: hideously dangerous) applications for these balloons is as superlight rocket propellant tanks. I wonder if they're using high pressures as prototyping for that purpose, because generally high altitude balloons use very low pressures and still expand extensively as they rise.

What are the balloons made of? Are they expected to be recovered?

 

[Desinishon]

Balloons are difficult to not successfully launch, just fill it up and let it go on a nice day. Looks from their site like they had to wait a long time for that nice day though. It would be nice if balloons could be used more, if only they were controllable, because they would space space launches very cheap. That said, there are a number of private operators of Aerobee-style solid rockets that aren't expensive anyway, only problem with them is that they undergo accelerations in excess of 30G iirc.

One of the more fun (read: hideously dangerous) applications for these balloons is as superlight rocket propellant tanks. I wonder if they're using high pressures as prototyping for that purpose, because generally high altitude balloons use very low pressures and still expand extensively as they rise.

What are the balloons made of? Are they expected to be recovered?

Super Pressure Balloons are generally made with a special formulation of polyethylene film that retains its strength, helium permeability and ductility at extreme altitudes. LLDPE films on its shell I think.
Well, yeah! They're expected to be recovered. This will give them valuable info which they'll use to improve their next super pressure balloon like what was the cause of leak or stuff like that. It's a quite troublesome task to recover a 2000+ kg balloon and 1k or more payload within it :p