How is it determined whether the Delta can handle wind shears?
TUMBIOLO: We use upper-level balloons, rawinsondes, as we call them. We launch several of them during the launch countdown and from the data that we get from those balloons — upper-level winds, direction and speed — the Delta engineers, they crank these numbers through their computers and they’re able to determine if the winds will affect, the wind shears will affect the vehicle as it’s going through space. DILLER: Can you explain a little bit more about what a rawinsonde balloon is? TUMBIOLO: A rawinsonde is a balloon that has hanging from it a series of instruments, instruments that gather data such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, wind speed, pressure, things of that nature, and these balloons are released from the ground all the way up to 100,000 feet into the atmosphere. And as this balloon is rising, all that data is transmitted back down to the ground and we use this to analyze our weather criteria. DILLER: What is the difference between a ground wind and an upper-lev
