By Alexia Severson
aseverson@lcsun-news.com @AlexiaMSeverson on Twitter
Posted: 10/22/2014 03:09:45 PM MDT
LAS CRUCES >> New Mexico State University has submitted a proposal to re-bid for a NASA contract that will provide an estimated $20 million to $30 million a year toward high-altitude scientific balloon research and scientific work conducted by the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, a NASA facility managed by the NMSU Physical Science Lab and located at Palestine, Texas.
The contract is administered by the by NASA's Balloon Program Office at Wallops Flight Facility of Goddard Space Flight Center and operates and maintains CSBF.
The Physical Science Lab (PSL) has held the contract for the past 27 years and has been the principal launcher of high altitude balloons for NASA's Scientific Balloon Program. The previous 10-year contract - NMSU's largest research contract - had a potential value of more than $200 million and was worth $28 million in the most recent year. The new contract will span five years (including a two-year base period and options for the next three years), said Dan Howard, NMSU executive vice president and provost.
'We're always looking for avenues to do scientific research and that's the role this contract fulfills,' Danny Ball, site manager for CSBF, said.
'We're confident that we're going to be successful in winning it again and it will be business as usual for us,' Ball said.
If won, this will be the fifth time the NMSU Physical Science Lab has won the competitive bid process, Ball said.
'That's a signal of how good a job we've done,' Howard said. 'NASA has come to depend on us ... and we have the best balloon launch team in the world I believe.'
Howard said there is one other competitor for the contract and the winner will be announced sometime in November.
'We're hopeful,' Howard said. 'We think we've done a really good job for NASA and NASA has let us know that they think we've done a really good job.'
CSBF is responsible for launching unmanned high altitude research balloons (about 400 feet in diameter) and getting payloads up into near space, more than 120,000 feet in altitude to track and recover scientific experiments suspended beneath them for NASA centers and universities throughout the world.
'NMSU's role is to be the experts in getting that payload up in the air to a high altitude and to keep it where we say it's going to be for a certain amount of time,' Howard said.
The PSL ballooning team launches about 25 high-altitude scientific balloons annually, with payloads weighing from several tens of pounds to 8,000 pounds each, according to the PSL website.
In September, CSBF launched three balloon experiments on three consecutive days for NASA's Scientific Balloon Program to test certain technology and collect various data, The balloons launched reached a height of 126,000 to 130,000 feet.
'Last summer we branched out into an area when where we tested decelerators,' Ball said.
CSBF spent three months at the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, testing a Low Density Supersonic Decelerator as part of a $150 million experiment to allow spacecraft to decelerate at a safe speed for future landings on Mars. This experiment provided aerodynamic data on technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
'Most people think we fly weather balloons,' Ball said. 'But we fly telescopes in areas of gamma ray astronomy and infrared astronomy, high energy astrophysics, cosmic ray astronomy and cosmic microwave background radiation.'
Alexia Severson may be reached at aseverson@lcsun-news.com
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