The following article was printed in The Fall River Spirit, June 7, 2007
"We have Liftoff"
by Cathy Lambert, Fall River Spirit Correspondent
Kuss Middle School, a NASA Explorer School, held its first ever weather balloon launch June 1. It was held at the Silvia School on Meridian Street. Students from Kuss Middle School, and also the Silvia School were in attendance.
The balloon tail was attached to a parachute for the landing and also eight PODS. Five of the pods were designed by the students and contained potato chips, each packed differently to test what materials would withstand the trip. Two of them contained GPS tracking devices and the final a camera to get photographs of the balloon's flight.
The project also included students tracking the balloon as it traveled from "Mission Control" which was also set up at the Silvia School. They followed along and kept in constant communication with people located in Buzzards Bay, the projected landing spot for the balloon, and also with students from Boston University who acted as a chase team and tracked the balloon from a car.
The launch had a lot of help from StratoStar Systems, a company founded by Jason Krueger and located in Upland Indianan.
Jason said, "The high altitude balloon can inflate up to 30 feet but for this experiment it will be inflated to between 6 to 8 feet." If inflated any more the balloon may have gone as far as Nantucket.
The Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium, whose director is retired astronaut Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman , also helped with the project. Hoffman, who has made five trips into space, told the students to "reach for the stars." He also told of different times he used balloon launches in his studies of space.
There was also a special patch designed for the launch. To choose the patch, the school held a contest and received about 30 entries. The winning patch entry came from a seventh grader. Everyone who attended the launch will receive the special patch.
Other events of the day included a design and launching of rockets made by the students. The students also made inclinometers that they will use to measure the height that the rockets traveled.
At about 10:20 a.m., students from the Ham Radio Club learned that the balloon went down before expected somewhere in the Copicut Reservoir near Freetown. The balloon will still be retrieved and the data collected during the flight still used to understand why it went down sooner than expected. |
