At Google, reported on the results of the Project Loon 2014 Bashny.Net

On the official page Project Project Loon on Google+ appeared curious record of test results balloons all over the world, which engineers are actively carried out in throughout the year. The main conclusion - a resource balls allows them to stay in the air for quite a long time without failure, keeping them sufficiently dense grouping.

One of the main problems of the project - a hostile environment have a significant destructive effect on the material of which is a balloon, and imagine a situation in which Google agreed to replenish regularly falling phones hard enough. At the moment, the maximum длительность ball stay in the atmosphere is 744 days - at the same time the record was made in the late sixties of the last century, and since then no one could even get close to him. Although it is considered , that normal service life of the ball is about 55-60 days, Google presumptuous enough said they hope to exceed this figure and reach the mark of 100 days.

In reality, everything was even a little better. Balloon codenamed "Marathon" was launched a team of engineers in New Zealand in July this year and stayed in the air as much as 134 days before landing in Chile. The collected statistics on this ball will in the future play this really significant success for the rest of the balls Project Loon. It is interesting to note the following reflection of one of the participants of the test: tiny holes in the shell of the ball is able to significantly reduce its service life, and the search for holes in the canvas area of ​​600 square meters is no better than finding a needle in a haystack. Reflecting on this problem, the engineer found himself happy thoughts about condoms and about the technique to identify the smallest defects in them, and the decision was made. So it was probably this technique and helped dramatically increase the life of "Road Runner».





The following three balls shared the championship speed, resistance to low temperatures and altitudes. So it is noted that for the ball Sprint Star was recorded speed of 324 km / h, The Frosty Survivor exposed to temperature -83 ° C, and High-Flier reached a height of 25.8 km, which is about twice the height of the civil aviation flights. in general, as you can tell, project engineers believe testing is quite successful, so we can hope for a speedy actual implementation Project Loon in life.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/242480/