4 Wednesday, October 28, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon Up, up and away; balloon launch supports research Teen driver cited after running off road The Battelle Memorial Institute teamed with Sisters- based ISTAR, headed by Steven Peterzen, to perform the launch of a stratospheric balloon from Sisters Eagle Airport last week. Battelle is the world9s largest nonprofit orga- nization which supports research in a variety of sci- entific investigation such as NEON, the NSF arctic pro- gram, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National L a b o r a t o r y, L a w r e n c e Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as well as several other national laboratories. Last year, Battelle funded the Sisters High School RISE program that includes a stratospheric balloon proj- ect that the local high school students design, construct and launch. According to Peterzen, the purpose of last week9s test flight was to demon- strate that the Differential Segmented Aperture (DSA) is an enabling technology for high-altitude and space systems. To achieve this goal, Battelle has contracted ISTAR to orchestrate the launch and flight operations of a stratospheric balloon with a CubeSat payload hav- ing DSA9s on the top and the bottom of the suspended gondola connected to low- cost radio-frequency and digital equipment. The near-space environ- ment of the stratosphere simulated some of the chal- lenges of operating the DSA in low earth orbit (LEO). In addition, typical strato- spheric balloon platforms utilize traditional anten- nas (patch, monopole, and dipole) for Sat Com and or telemetry. The system for tracking, commanding, and receiving creates the need for multiple antennas 4 one or more per signal of inter- est (SOI) 4 resulting in an increase in system size, weight, power requirements and cost (SWAP-C), while decreasing function agility.