In the late 1970s, Visidyne began a period of involvement in high-altitude balloon-borne payload programs. Payloads were designed for staring at Earth infrared backgrounds, measuring various atmospheric parameters with lidar systems, and tracking rocket launch plumes.

More recently, Visidyne designed a platform for the Navy Research Laboratory's HARBOR-MIST program in which an imaging system was flown to 100,000 feet using a 5 million cubic foot balloon.  A requirement for these measurements was to maintain pointing accuracy of 1 arcsec/sec for three minutes using rate-integrating gyros.  Pointing range was 360 degrees continuous azimuth, +/- 75 degrees elevation and +/- 10 degrees roll.  Payload capacity of up to 500 pounds can be accommodated by our existing platform.