I turned around a message recently from Jim Billups and for fun clicked on his website. WOW! From his home workshop on Palomar, Jim produces products that have gone into space! Dutch Bergman has done the welding at his barn on the Mountain. Isn’t that cool!?! I asked Jim for a little more info to share with you. Keep reading to learn about what he creates and check out the You Tube video! Very fun!
From Jim:
Building a calibration mechanism for the POLAR BEAR telescope currently. Was built by UCBerkeley, UCSanDiego, and many others. Was at White Mountain, up on the east side of the Owens Valley; currently being moved to one of the telescope sights in Chile, the Atacama Desert in fact.
Also have a small series of solar arrays which will fly in Antarctica late this month, the BARREL project, UCBerkeley and Dartmouth. If that is successful we will provide another 200 solar arrays to the project over the next couple of years. Dutch Bergman welded all those for us. Also, he welded the frames for the SUNRISE project, NCAR Boulder CO and Max Planck, Germany. Those were good size frames. Along with some frames for the CREAM project which has been flying in Antarctica (separate yearly flights) for the past five years. SUNRISE flew out of Sweden.
Haven’t update my site for about 6x years; many links are not there. Been meaning to revamp the site, but I am using old MicroSoft FrontPage, fairly obsolete. Even my server in the Bay area, does not support it any longer. Have to pick up some bare bones software, no frills. Just have not got around to it yet. Maybe when there is a couple of feet of snow on the ground, I will feel the ‘nudge’.
This will give you an idea of what these balloons are all about. At float, 130Kft into the stratosphere, the balloon will expand to 450ft in diameter; pretty big when you think about a 300ft football field. They, NASA, launch these balloons from Texas, New Mexico, Antarctica, Australia, and Sweden. The Antarctic flights are circumpolar, the US born flights are just 24-48hrs. Australian flights go from Alice Springs to the coast, Swedish flights terminate in Western Canada.
Typically, these are astrophysical instruments: studies on black holes, solar magnetic fields, Cosmic Microwave Background (Big Bang), etc.
This is a clip of the SUNRISE launch in Sweden last year. Typical launch. We build the power system, including the solar arrays noticeable at launch with Dutch Bergman’s welding talents.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Rz7c0NJSE
Jim Billups
760.390.3065
Palomar Mountain News 
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