  Indian Centre for Space Physics has taken a novel strategy to study low
energy cosmic rays and astrophysical X-ray sources which involve very light
weight payloads up to about five kilograms on board a single or multiple
balloons which are usually used for meteorological purposes. The mission
duration could be anywhere from 3-12 hours. Our strategy provides extreme
flexibility in mission preparation and its operation using a very economical
budget. There are several limitations but our innovative approach has been able
to extract significant amount of scientific data out of these missions. So far,
over one hundred missions have been completed by us to near space and a wealth
of data has been collected. The payloads are recovered and are used again.
Scientific data is stored on board computer and the atmospheric data or payload
location is sent to ground in real time. Since each mission is different, we
present here the general strategy for a typical payload and provide some
results we obtained in some of these missions.
