Gliding through the Stratosphere

By Olivia Humes

At 50,000 feet in the air, nearly twice the height of Mt. Everest and a mile higher than commercial airliners can fly, Steve Fossett and Einar Enevoldson flew an unpowered glider through an unpredictable mountain wave, setting a world record for the highest flight of an unpowered aircraft.

Nacreous clouds over Antarctica,
from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Nacreous_clouds_Antarctica.jpg­)

That was in 2006. This year, on March 16th, 2013 at the Museum of Flight, Enevoldson presented his record setting experience and his adventurous future plans for soaring even higher. By August 2013, Enevoldson and his team set the ambitious record to reach 90,000 feet. Achieving this goal requires building a custom, carbon fiber, pressurized glider capable of riding waves in the atmosphere the same way a surfer rides ocean waves.

But the Perlan Project, named for the Icelandic word for pearl, is not just about breaking records. It’s also about learning more about the so called “forgotten zone” of the planet’s atmosphere, the region between 70,000 and 120,000 feet in the air that is too high for conventional aircraft to explore, and too low to be accessible by spacecraft. Despite its remoteness, this layer of the atmosphere plays a profound role in the earth’s climate. This region is the home of the ozone layer; the polar vortices, which helps to isolate the poles during winter and cool them further; and mysterious high altitude clouds, such as nacreous clouds, also known as “mother-of-pearl” clouds, that lend the project its name. By studying this region of the atmosphere, scientists can investigate how pollutants, like the ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons and small particles thought to seed stratospheric clouds, interact with long term climate trends. Learning about interactions in the upper atmosphere will provide scientists with an important piece of the puzzle needed to understand our changing climate.

Mountain waves diagram,
Wikipedia via http://perlanproject.org/
stratospheric-mountain-waves/

The Perlan Project will also explore the winds that give the glider its lift--mountain waves. Under the right conditions, wind blowing across mountain ranges can produce turbulent waves in the atmosphere. These waves can sometimes grow to tremendous heights, and gliders, like the Perlan, can use them in order to gain elevation without engines. How high these waves go, and how they behave in the upper atmosphere is still unknown. These waves may also “break” like water waves do when they are close to shore, but so far, the phenomenon has never been observed. The Perlan team hopes to investigate the effect firsthand.

The Perlan Project, like many other expeditions before it, pushes a new frontier in human knowledge. The Perlan glider’s flights both set a record for highest altitude achieved by a glider, but also demonstrates the success of its engineers and design, and adds to our knowledge of our home planet.

To find out more about the Perlan Project, visit:
http://perlanproject.org/

I pose with the Perlan 1 glider at the Seattle Museum of Flight

The record setting Perlan 1 is also on permanent display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.