An interesting post by Gadget Lab gives us some really good insight about the story behind Google’s Project Loon, which aims to bring internet to every remote place.
The report has some information about how Project Loon’s testing was mistaken to be a UFO sighting:
Plenty of others saw the object too: The Kentucky State Police received multiple reports of sightings. A couple of days later, the Appalachian News-Express ran a story headlined “Mystery Object in Sky Captivates Locals.” Regional television stations reported that government agencies professed ignorance. The story was picked up by CNN. And the UFO-loving website Ashtar Command Crew linked to the news as ostensible proof of continuing visits from the Galactic Federation fleet. Epling, for his part, didn’t jump to extraterrestrial conclusions. But still, what was it?
Project Loon’s Rich DeVaul, who was working on the possibilities of getting the balloon to fly in the stratosphere, had come up with this idea, but then, it turned out that there was a flaw in the design:
As DeVaul began spreadsheeting the possibilities, he came up with another concept. Rather than a behemoth that required massive amounts of energy to fight stratospheric winds to stay in place, he found himself drawn to the idea of smaller, cheaper weather balloons that sometimes stay aloft for 40 days or more, circling the globe. “I thought, why not have a bunch of these things, covering a whole area? How crazy would that be?” he says.
The flaw was that it was super hard to steer the balloons in such conditions, and so the flaw was fixed with an idea of increasing the altitude of the balloon, instead of steering it. To do that, here are some of the critical data they had to analyze:
… analyzing the voluminous data about wind currents, past and present, available from the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But after analyzing all the data, and working on a feasible solution, the project finally went live on June 15th. You can read the entire story at Wired. Just hit the source link.
Image Source: Wired.