At 90,000 feet up, balloons don’t last too long

These photos were sent from the recent launch of the weather balloon in New Hampshire as part of the educational/research project known as SMART (I wrote about it last week). When the balloons get to 90,000 to 100,000 feet up, the air is so thin that the pressure of their innards makes them explode. These photos were taken from a video, says UNH Prof. Charles Smith: “The video takes 3 or 6 frames each second (I cannot remember which) so the 4-image sequence is a little less than or a little greater than 1 second in the life and death of latex.”