Project Loon, Google’s high-speed internet-beaming
balloons bringing connectivity to remote areas, now has an
ability to launch up to 20 balloons per day. According to a Google+ post, this is possible because
the autofill equipment has improved and the time to fill the balloon has come
down under 5 minutes.
The balloons can now last up to 10 times longer in the stratosphere, than
they did in 2013 and a lot of them have lasted over 100 days – with 130 days
being a record. According to the post, the amount of air taken to fill up one
Project Loon balloon is equivalent to filling up 7000 party balloons and that
took a lot of time. But with the advanced autofill method that process has been
sped up.
In order to accurately maneuver the
balloons to the correct location in the stratosphere, Google engineers are
constantly computing thousands of trajectory simulations. “For example, one
flight came within 1.5km of our target destination over a flight of 9,000
kilometers, purely through predicting and sailing with the stratospheric winds.
This is great for getting our balloons to where users need them, and great for getting
balloons to our recovery zones at the end of their lifetime to make our
recovery team’s job that much easier,” says the post.
Internet beaming using devices
placed in the stratosphere is gaining a lot of momentum off late. It is
believed that Facebook plans to start testing its internet-carrying solar-powered drones in 2015, with the
ultimate aim of getting two-thirds of the global population online. More
recently, Tesla founder Elon Musk has partnered with satellite-industry
veteran Greg Wyler to devise a feasible and relatively low-cost way to put about 700 satellites,
each weighing less than 250 pounds, into orbit to provide wireless Internet
anywhere on the planet. While these companies are yet to launch their products,
Google has already got the ball rolling.
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