A systematic approach to designing Multi-Experiment Platforms forlong duration ballooning

The interest in LDB flights has grown dramatically over the years. However, since the success of a mission is strongly dependent on the costs, one possible way to improve the overall efficiency of a campaign is to perform different experiments during the same flight, even though this requires more versatile platforms. The design of this kind of system is very difficult to accomplish. In this paper the authors discuss the main issues related to the design of multi-experiment platforms for LDB flights, and try to provide some guidelines for making the approach more systematic. An application to a two-experiment platform design problem is also briefly described.