Recovery

We had a great flight. No leaks, no major catastrophes. It lasted 22 days and we circled around the entire continent of Antarctica one and a half times. As we came back around over the launch site at LBD, however, we knew we all watching our GPS sensors as the latitude started to rise. McMurdo station is at a latitude of 77.85deg South. So ideally, our latitude would remain roughly constant throughout the flight, but the longitude would cycle around 360deg--a perfect circle. If the latitude starts to rise, then the balloon trajectory is slowly moving out away from the continent.

Fortunately, the great people at NASA have a plan. They saw a nice landing site for us near the Australian base and cut us down there. Here are some pretty enjoyable blog posts detailing what happened to ANITA after that: