Helium Balloon Experiment to Take Aerial Photos
“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, LIFTOFF!”
These are the most anticipated words to a group of 13-17 year-old Ironwood students who have just completed the design and assembly of their first major payload and anxiously await launching it into space via helium balloon.
Named “CricketSat” and "IronSat," the project is a pilot program begun in the spring as an enrichment activity at Ironwood. Residents selected for the project must continue to meet their regular Ironwood program responsibilities, and groups of three boys and three girls work on their payloads twice a week for one or two hours each session for a period of six weeks.
CriketSat is an actual scientific experiment that allows students to measure atmospheric temperature and humidity as the weather balloon rises above the ground and gains altitude. The remote sensor circuits are simple, student-built PC boards that convert temperature changes to a tone and broadcasts it over a radio frequency.
In addition to a ham radio, students have added a GPS unit to each command module in the payload in order to transmit its location while it is airborne and when it falls back to earth. A small digital camera has been rigged with a timer to take photographs of the earth every 30 seconds as the balloon reaches 80,000 to 100,000 feet during its 1.5 to 2.5 hour flight.
“This is a real world NASA-type space program,” said science instructor Mark Ford, who began the pilot program with a dozen Ironwood teenagers in April. “This is not an iPod simulation or a classroom lecture, but a hands-on project. It’s real, and for some of the students the results will be awesome, and for others the experiment will not work or something will go wrong and it will be heartbreaking. But this is the real world.”
To the teens' dismay, many obstacles can cause their experiment to go wrong. One, the latex helium balloon carrying the teen’s precious cargo may drift out over the ocean and never be found again, or the payload parachute may drop on a power line or private property where owners will not allow access, or the payload could be damaged and destroyed.
“If we meet with misfortune and are not able to recover the payload, this is what science is all about,” Ford said. “That’s what makes it real. Bad things happen. But you try to reduce the risks as much as you can and just put it together and see what happens.”
Also, the batteries powering the heater circuits may fail due to colder temperatures as the balloon’s altitude increases and cause the experiment to fail. Unfortunately, the launch may need to be scrubbed entirely, which is what happened with the teens’ first efforts.
“The kids did a fantastic job assembling the basic payload comprised of sensors and a small radio that broadcast weather information in Morse code,” Ford said. “As a courtesy to the FAA, I called in our proposed launch information, but one hour before launch I got a call from the Secret Service in Washington D.C. notifying me that upper air winds would put our scientific balloon into the no fly zone where President Obama’s flight was scheduled to pass through. So we had to scrub our first mission.”
Naturally the teens were disappointed, but their efforts provided greater insight in how to better plan for the second group’s launch slated for September. Ford is hoping for a much better outcome this time.
“It depends on atmospheric conditions, but after the balloon bursts, the parachute is likely to come down 60 to 80 miles away,” Ford said. “Once the payload is found via its GPS tracking, students will be able to recover the data and the digital camera with it’s newly captured images. The kids are very excited.”
Meticulous notes, logs and records are kept to aid the young scientists as they progress in the assembly of components, testing of systems and analyzing of incoming data. Launch results and photos are often shared on websites posted by similar school programs, encouraging many new scientific ballooning programs throughout the country. A number of teens choose to pursue science as a career as a result of the challenges and rewards they experienced with their own launches.
For the teens, scientific ballooning offers an opportunity to take an abstract concept and make it a hands-on experience as well as excite their imaginations.
“Teens learn teamwork and skills such as soldering and assembling circuits, ham radio masts and communications components, and they utilize creative skills to design and decorate their payloads,” Ford said. “They put all the pieces together and send it up, and what comes back are real photos that look like something from the NASA website. Students can say, ‘that’s my payload up there’, and ‘my payload took that picture’. It brings their experience to a concrete point, and they can say, ‘I get it’.”
“Scientific ballooning is an incredibly valuable experience,” Ford concluded. “The process we use for building and operating a scientific balloon payload is a junior version of the way NASA works with satellites in space. It gives resident teens the ability to work on something real without spending millions of dollars. Even more important than the technical skills they learn, every participant has a chance to experience the emotional side of building and launching scientific balloons. The joy of success, the anxiety of decision-making, the sadness and anger of failure – these are all a normal part of life.”
Read more about Ironwood Scientific Ballooning in the
press release.
"I felt that the scientific balloon project was very interesting and I have never seen anything like it. The coolest part for me was watching the balloon get blown up and it was amazing to know that the balloon could carry up to 30 pounds! Also it was cool to see how the instructor Mark was so passionate about his favorite thing, scientific ballooning. . . When I get older I want to do something I am passionate about. Also when we launched the balloon, it was cool to see it go up, and everybody was relieved to see it get launched without popping. Everybody's hard work paid off!"
Cory W.
Ironwood Maine Students Present Aerospace Research Project at Fall Meeting of the National Council of Space Grant Directors hosted by the Maine Space Grant Consortium
Students from Ironwood Maine School launched a high-altitude balloon carrying a NASA-like payload in September, and then presented their findings Oct. 15, 2010 before an audience of 200 representatives from all 52 space grant consortia including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, NASA personnel, students and guests.
Ironwood Maine received a grant from the Maine Space Grant Consortium, the state agent for NASA’s educational and outreach initiatives, to fund IronSat, the student-built scientific ballooning project which resembles a real NASA-type aerospace program. Teams of Ironwood Maine students began working on two scientific ballooning initiatives from April through September. Ironwood Maine students designed and built the payloads attached to a high-altitude weather balloon, the most recent of which launched on Sept. 22, 2010. The balloon, capable of entering the stratosphere, can reach as high as 120,000 feet - 99.5% above the Earth’s atmosphere.
On Friday, Oct. 15, 2010, students were asked to give a presentation in Portland, Maine at the Maine Space Grant Consortium, the organization hosting the 2010 Fall Meeting of the National Council of Space Grant Directors.
Here is Academic Director Larry Reynolds’ account of the day’s events.
