After a year of hard work and long coffee-fueled nights, the 14 students that make up Science Honors have launched weather balloons they have constructed to take measurements of the upper atmosphere.
Leading up to the launch, Science Honors student Jonathan Yuly remarked, “It will be really exciting to watch what happens with our year’s project, and how future years will move forward with it.”
Each balloon was outfitted with its own set of sensors and instruments. The sensors were run by onboard processing chips called a BASIC Stamp Boards. These boards act as the brains of the boxes. They tell the sensors how to work and then deliver the information they collect to a radio that sends it back to the students at Houghton.
Four teams were collected from the students to design an experiment that would use the balloons and sensors to analyze data about climate change. Groups did experiments that ranged from measuring CO2 to the refraction of light through clouds and how it affects the sun’s rays hitting Earth.
The balloons were launched on Tuesday, April 23rd at nine in the morning after a short press conference. Unfortunately, as science is wont to do, the live experiment was met with many challenges. On the night before the launch, two of the radios on the boxes were fried after being overcharged with current.
R.D. Marek’s radio was one of the two that was ruined. At 2 am, in the Paine building, he was quoted as saying “I’m looking for a ‘Lazarus moment’.”
Eventually, he got it when his radio resumed normal function. The other radio did not however and that group’s balloon was not able to launch.
The teams prepared to launch 3 balloons from the quad on Tuesday morning when they were met with several unforeseeable misfortunes.
The first group to launch had no issues in launching their balloon. However, once it was up in the sky, they found that although it was transmitting data to the computer on the ground, the computer was not properly recording the data.
The next group was disappointed when their cut-down system, meant to release the box from the balloon in case of an emergency, was activated by a faulty radio transmission and cut the balloon from the box as it was beginning to lift off the quad.
Lastly, the third group found themselves similarly unlucky. When released, the knot that tied their balloon to the box came undone and the team watched as their balloon floated away.
The balloons, costing around $300 each, were not able to be replaced immediately and the two launches that failed were not able to relaunch.
Despite these issues, the crowd watching the launch still enjoyed getting to see the experiment unfold. Said freshman, Myra Mushalla,“I got to see many science honors students work on their balloon projects for a long time and getting to watch the launch off the quad was very satisfying, even for me; so I imagine it was great for them.”
The teams retired to the Science Honors Lab after the launch to watch the one successful launch travel northward on a GPS tracker that was linked to the box. Once the balloon showed that it was in a constant position for several minutes, the teams piled into three Houghton vans and drove to Dansville, NY to retrieve it.
A woman who owns the property where the box landed led the teams up into the woods where they found the box 50 feet up, hanging on a tree limb, unable to be retrieved. With this last disappointment, the teams got back into their vans and went out for ice cream.
Plans to retrieve this box have been set into motion, but at the present time, it is still swinging away from the top branches of a tree in Dansville.
