Plan, fly, and recover a high-altitude balloon mission — from one screen, built for classrooms.
NSI Mission Control is the ground-station software for the Near Space Investigations (NSI) program from Atlantis Educational Services. It connects to an NSI Ground Station over USB, receives live telemetry from an NSI Flight Computer riding a balloon to the edge of space, and turns a school field into a mission control room: live map, instruments, flight prediction, antenna pointing, and a complete record of the flight for the classroom afterwards.
It is free to download, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux (including Raspberry Pi), and needs no account, no licence key, and no setup — install it, plug in the Ground Station, and fly.
⭳ Download the latest release · What you need · Install
A high-altitude balloon flight is one of the best science lessons there is: a student-built payload climbs through −60 °C at 100,000+ feet, photographs the curvature of the Earth, bursts, and parachutes home. But the flying part has traditionally demanded ham-radio experience, hand-rolled tracking scripts, and a specialist at the keyboard.
Mission Control removes that barrier. A teacher and a group of students can plan a launch, check the airspace, predict the landing, fly the mission, and drive to the payload — without a support call. Every step happens in plain language on one screen, and everything the flight produces is saved automatically.
The Dashboard shows the whole mission at a glance, updating with every telemetry packet from the balloon:
- Live map with the balloon's track, your Ground Station, the launch site, and a continuously updated landing prediction
- Altitude ticker with ascent rate — the number everyone crowds around at launch
- Eight live instruments: atmospheric pressure, external temperature, humidity, IR / Earth reflection, payload temperature, UV index, battery, and packet rate
- GPS flight data — position, satellites, ascent/descent rates, burst altitude
- IMU attitude — pitch, roll, yaw, acceleration, magnetometer
- Charts — altitude vs. external temperature, and altitude vs. time, live
- A link banner that always tells you the state of the radio link in words, not codes
The Map tab tracks the flight over street or terrain maps that can be downloaded ahead of time — because launch sites rarely have good cell service. After burst, the live landing prediction updates from the balloon's actual descent, so the chase crew drives toward where the payload is going, not where it was.
Plan the entire mission days ahead, from your desk:
- Launch site picker with the Ground Station's own GPS as one-click input
- Gas fill calculator — balloon size, payload weight, target ascent rate in, litres of helium and neck lift out
- Flight prediction from real forecast winds — launch-time sweep shows how the landing zone moves hour by hour, so you pick the calmest window
- Airspace and NOTAM check — nearby airports and active notices, before you commit
- Launch-day weather panel and a pre-flight checklist the class works through together
- Printable mission pack — one PDF with the plan, prediction, checklist and contacts, ready for the clipboard
- Plans live in a library: draft → flown, with the recording attached to the plan afterwards
Up to three student-built experiment pods ride along, each with its own sensors. The PODs tab shows each pod's link and data live, so every team watches their own experiment fly.
Every session writes a CSV as packets arrive — no "did you remember to record?" moment. Replay any recording at up to 10× to relive the flight in class, and export chart data for analysis in a spreadsheet. The telemetry format is plain comma-separated text a science class can open anywhere.
- Firmware updates delivered automatically from the Atlantis firmware service — downloaded once, verified cryptographically, then installable offline. The app checks for device updates the way it checks for its own.
- Flight logs — download the Flight Computer's SD-card recordings over USB, with checksum verification
- Radio pairing — read and set the radio network so multiple classrooms can fly at the same field without crosstalk
- Genuine-hardware check — each NSI board carries a factory-provisioned cryptographic identity the app verifies
Pick "Demo flight simulator" from the port list and the app flies a scripted balloon mission — real telemetry format, live map, working instruments. Evaluate the software, train a class, or rehearse a launch day, all before the kit arrives.
The Resources tab carries three complete documents, readable in-app and offline, each with a printable PDF:
- Quick Start Guide — download to planned mission in a few pages
- User Manual — every tab, every control, and why it behaves the way it does
- Complete Guide to Launching High Altitude Balloons — hardware, physics, launch-day procedure, and regulations country by country
| Hardware | An NSI Ground Station (USB) and an NSI Flight Computer — the flight kit from the NSI program. No hardware yet? The built-in demo simulator runs everything. |
| Computer | Windows 10/11 (64-bit) · macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon or Intel) · 64-bit Linux with glibc 2.28+ (Ubuntu 20.04+, Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit on Pi 4/5) |
| Internet | Not required to fly. Needed once for device firmware, and when planning for forecasts, map downloads and airspace data. Do the once-per-machine downloads before a trip — everything then works offline at the launch site. |
Grab the file for your machine from the latest release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Windows 10/11 | NSI-Mission-Control-Setup-<version>.exe |
| macOS — Apple Silicon (M-series) | NSI-Mission-Control-<version>-arm64.dmg |
| macOS — Intel | NSI-Mission-Control-<version>.dmg |
| Linux x64 | NSI-Mission-Control-<version>.AppImage or nsi-mission-control_<version>_amd64.deb |
| Linux arm64 / Raspberry Pi 4/5 | NSI-Mission-Control-<version>-arm64.AppImage or nsi-mission-control_<version>_arm64.deb |
Not sure which Mac you have? Apple menu → About This Mac — an "M" chip means Apple Silicon.
The app updates itself: when a new version is released, it offers the update in-app.
Code-signing certificates are in progress with Apple and Microsoft. Until they land, your computer warns you once — the software is fine; it simply has no certificate attached yet:
- Windows — SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC": click More info → Run anyway
- macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later — open it once and let it be blocked, then System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, Open Anyway
- macOS 14 or earlier — right-click the app in Applications → Open → Open
- Linux AppImage —
chmod +xthe file, then run it; .deb —sudo apt install ./<file>.deb
Once certificates are issued this section disappears and installs are prompt-free.
Flight Computer and Ground Station firmware comes from the Atlantis firmware service, built into the app — nothing to configure. Every image is cryptographically signed, and the app verifies the signature before a single byte is written to a board. Firmware downloads once per machine and then installs offline, so update at school, not at the launch site.
Questions about a kit, the software, or a flight: scientificsales.com
Include your Mission Control version (Help → About) and, for flight questions, the session CSV (Export on the toolbar).
Issues and pull requests on this repository are not monitored — it distributes the released installers; the application source is maintained privately.
© 2026 Atlantis Educational Services. All rights reserved. NSI® and NSI® Mission Control are trademarks of Atlantis Educational Services.
The software is licensed, not sold. Redistribution of the installers and reverse engineering of the application or device firmware are not permitted. Third-party components are credited in Appendix B of the User Manual, inside the app.