T.I.F.R. BALLOON FACILITY

(at Hyderabad)

TIFR owns a full fledged Balloon Facility at its launching centre at Hyderabad (central India). This centre is equipped with trained personnel for designing, fabricating, launching and tracking large volume balloons for scientific experiments. The ground station for telemetry & telecommand transmission / reception is also well equipped with adequate hardware and software support personnel as well as equipment. The scientific experiments which now a days regularly use this balloon facility are :

• Space Astronomy :
  • Far Infrared Astronomy ;
  • X-ray & Gamma-ray Astronomy ;
• Atmospeheric sciences, etc.

Balloons are launched during two seasons during each year : Summer (January - April) and Winter (October- December). Inaddition to launching balloons , this centre also regularly monitors & analyses local weather at tropospheric and stratospheric altitudes which is very crutial for making decisions about balloon launches.