HERMES: A Data and Specimens Transporter from the Stratosphere to the Ground—The First Experimental Flight

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work entitled “HERMES, a data and specimens transporter from the stratosphere to the ground: the first experimental flight” develop expermentally. I don't recommend the publication of the work in the present form for the following reasons:

- 1page : Please state the purpose of the study clearly in the abstract.

- 2page line 1 : The form needs to be corrected.

- I can't find Fig. 3

- In the Fig. 8, I can't read the text.

- In the Fig. 14, I can't read the text.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 This paper proposed a design of an unmanned glider released from the Large Long Duration Balloons which can transfer the experimental results to the ground.

This paper is well-written, and the topic is interesting, the proposed method is useful for research in the stratospheric. I recommend it be accepted after minor revision.

 There are some issues that should be clarified as below:

1、  If possible, please analyze the communication status during the balloon flight and the drone’s release, like when the line of sight communications be lost and how the transfer speed changed during this process, I think it’s useful for the other researcher.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In order to get experimental results from large stratospheric balloons before recovering the payload, this article describes a system equipped with an autonomous glider called HERMES (HEmera Returning MESsenger). Also, this article shows us some information about the first experimental flight of the whole system. The technical breakthrough is solid and the experimental results are interesting. For the further improvement of the paper, I have the following opinions：

1. The layout of the article content could be improved. For example, the indentation of serial numbers in 2.2 section needs to be consistent, and the format and layout of the images in the text need to be modified.

2. The English language in this article needs a great revision.

 

3. In the comparative analysis part of the paper, the improvement of the method is introduced in detail, but the analysis of the experimental phenomena is a little insufficient, especially the result analysis of the task execution order. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf