But even then, the job isn't done. The payload's valuable instrumentation must be recovered. Antarctica is a good place to send up balloons because of the emptiness of the space, but more importantly because of the regular wind pattern which stabilizes over the continent in midsummer. The balloon, when launched from Williams Field, will circle the continent and most likely return nearby, to be brought down on the Ross Ice Shelf for easy recovery. They run tests to be sure everything is working properly, and collect some early data.
All data is stored on board for the duration of the flight.
After those first hours, though, the balloon and its payload are only reachable for a few minutes every couple of hours. The NSBF team at Williams Field has enough equipment to have the two balloons in the air at once, though that has never happened before in Antarctica. Later this season a similar launch will lift a project run by a research team led by scientists at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Washington, who didn't even expect to launch their project in Antarctica this season. They had hoped to launch in Alaska last June, but were unable to. They scrambled to make the trip, helped by the fact that they'd never really unpacked in June.