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Aerostat. An aerostat (from Ancient Greek ἀήρ (aḗr) 'air' and στατός (statós) 'standing', via French) is a lighter-than-air aircraft that gains its lift through the use of a buoyant gas. Aerostats include unpowered balloons and powered airships. A balloon may be free-flying or tethered.
Airships, balloons, and blimps generate buoyancy lift or aerostatic lift using an envelope filled with a less dense gas than air, such as helium, enabling them to fly freely and “float” without needing forward airspeed. Such aircraft have been collectively called “airships” or “aerostats.”
An aerostat is an aircraft that generates lift by using a lifting gas to become lighter than air. Aerostats are named so because they utilize aerostatic lift, a buoyant force that does not require movement through surrounding air.
Altaeros builds the world's most advanced autonomous aerostats to support commercial and government applications.
An aerostat is a craft that gains lift using a buoyant gas, such as helium or hydrogen, and therefore is lighter than air. All known field operational systems today use helium as their key “lifting” gas (it is non-flammable, so considered safer than hydrogen).
The aerostat consists of four major parts or assemblies: the hull and fin, windscreen and radar platform, airborne power generator, and rigging and tether; they are kite balloons obtaining aerodynamic lift from relative wind and buoyancy from being lighter than air.
TCOM’s Operational Aerostat Platforms offer unrivaled versatility and performance. These medium-sized aerostat systems offer both the flexibility and portability for accelerated launch and retrieval, along with the capacity for sustained deployment for up to two weeks at a time.
When necessary, the tether can house fiber optic strands to download data from the payloads without risk of interference and copper wires to deliver power to the payloads. An aerostat provides persistence and never inconveniently passes over the horizon like a satellite does.
A lighter-than-air aircraft, or aerostat, is a vehicle that achieves flight by creating buoyancy or lift by using lifting gas that is lighter than air. This method contrasts with a heavier-than-air aircraft, or aerodyne, which generates lift with the flow of air over an airfoil.
Just east of busy Interstate 95 at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, a powerful radar attached to an aerostat scans the air and sea for threats. On the U.S. border with Mexico near El Paso, Texas, a similar tethered system employs sensors looking for drug smugglers and illegal migrants.