Researcher explains mission of strange balloon seen over Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – You may have seen a large balloon floating over the Las Vegas valley on Monday. It wasn’t a weather balloon, nor was it a UFO.

It was a special kind of research balloon called a Stratollite, with a mission of tracking solar radiation where planes fly.

W. Kent Tobiska and the team at Space Environment Technologies are using the balloons to create a system that can track solar radiation levels at different altitudes in real-time. After five years of research, they proved they could do it last Saturday.

“As of last Saturday, it was the first weekend we’ve actually demonstrated that all of our data is coming down in real-time,” Tobiska said.

As air density decreases at higher altitudes, the effects of solar radiation are stronger.

Another factor that can affect space radiation is solar storms, which is one of the reasons Tobiska’s team is creating a real-time radiation tracker.

“Pilots will be able to say, there’s a big storm going on here. We’re going to fly, 3,000 feet lower, and that will reduce our radiation level by half,” he said.

Tobiska said they expect to have their system running around the clock in two years.

Tobiska and a UNLV researcher 8 News Now spoke with both said that the level of radiation you receive from a coast-to-coast flight is less than a chest X-ray.

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