TUSTIN, Calif. - An enormous metallic balloon will piggyback aboard the JAWSAT launcher on Friday for a trip into space, where the U.S. Air Force will use the shimmering inflatable sphere to refine its satellite-tracking prowess.
The balloon will spring from a tiny hexagonal canister shortly after being placed in orbit, rapidly inflating to its full 12-foot (3.6-meter) diameter with the help of a tank of nitrogen.
Once inflated, the balloons five-layer skin will grow rigid, allowing it to orbit the Earth for at least a year - even if punctured by micrometeoroids.
The Air Force will periodically beam low-power lasers at the balloon in order to hone its ability to track satellites. The beams will bounce back to Earth off the mirror-like balloon, which is 90 percent reflective.
"Its like a huge ball-bearing," said Koorosh Guidanean, program manager for the Optical Sphere Calibration Experiment at Tustin, California-based LGarde Inc., maker of the balloon.
The lasers will not harm the balloons aluminum and Kapton polyester skin, sandwiched together in a layer just 1.2 mil (1 one-thousandth of an inch or 0.03 millimeters) thick. Thats about twice the thickness of a common kitchen garbage bag.
"This will furnish us with a dedicated target, mainly for tracking," said John Anderson, a senior engineer at the Starfire Optical Range on Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico. The Air Force will also use the balloon to measure and compensate for any atmospheric distortions that would affect the tracking work, including spreading of the laser beams themselves.
Anderson said the Department of Defense restricts the pointing of even low-power lasers at actual satellites. The balloon, which Guidanean said cost roughly $2 million, is a comparatively low-cost and consistently available alternative.
In fact, the balloon should be visible to the naked eye during its frequent passes approximately 450 miles (720 kilometers) overhead. Guidanean said LGarde plans to post updates on its website (http://www.lgarde.com) alerting viewers to when the balloon might streak across the sky.
The 25-employee Southern California company began in 1971, making inflatable decoys for the Air Force. Since then, they have launched about 140 inflatable structures into space, including decoys that mimic the radar signature of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). A Cold War favorite, the decoys served both as practice targets and to thwart Soviet ability to track incoming warheads.
"They would confuse the enemy -- if they had any way of knocking them down," Guidanean said.
LGarde -- the name was patched together from the initials of its founders -- is probably best known for the Inflatable Antenna Experiment.
The 46-foot (14-meter) antenna was inflated in space in May 1996 after being carried aloft by Space Shuttle Endeavour.
The company considers itself a pioneer in inflatable technology, and is currently working on inflatable solar panels, as well as trusses that could be used on future space missions, including the International Space Station.
Later this year, LGarde hopes to start work on a balloon that will not fly in space, but will be used as part of a next-generation neutrino detector placed underground in Kamiokande, Japan.
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