Sending a Weather Baloon with a Camera to the Edge of Space

I have seen numerous blog posts, news stories, and links about the Spanish teenagers who have managed to send a weather balloon to the edge of space (check their webpage HERE). It seems like the people writing these stories are hailing this as some new accomplishment never been done before, when in fact me and a team of Geography students from UNC-Charlotte did just this 2 years ago!!

It was part of a GEOG class from spring of 2007 that we began to build modules that would be attached to the end of a latex weather balloon and sent to the edge of space. We first started by constructing a suitable, insulated box to hold our instruments and our cameras. Since we were actually going to the very edge of space, it was going to be very cold (upward of -80 degrees Fahrenheit). Using a few pieces of foam board and foam, we constructed small boxes for each team that would contain a camera, weather sensors, and a small heater to keep everything warm on the journey. Once we had completed our boxes it was time to go out into the field and attach everything to our weather balloon.

We started out very early on a Saturday morning and made our way to the Monroe Regional Airport. We had a hanger reserved for the day to set everything up we needed, and using a few tanks of helium we began to fill our balloon.

Here we are in the hanger filling the balloon up. I'm standing in the back with a grey coat on and white cotton gloves that we used to ensure we didn't compromise the integrity of our latex balloon.

Once we had the balloon filled up, we began to attach the "tail", which contained each team's box of instruments, as well as a GPS pack and a parachute that we would use to track it so we could retrieve it once it landed. Once we had everything in place, we let the balloon go and watched as it took off like a rocket into the sky.

Here is our balloon taking off, you can clearly see the "tail" with our insturments attached.

It wasn't long and we were off in our van to track the balloon as it took off across the countryside. There was a slight breeze that day and it took our balloon in a SE direction towards the coast.

This picture shows the balloon several thousand feet off the ground travelling towards the NC coast at the mercy of the wind

Using our GPS we were able to track the balloon over almost 100 miles to the sandhills region of NC where we believed the balloon touched down. We drove around in circles around cotton fields and farmland trying to find the best signal and the best place to get out and start looking. Once we thought we were really close, we set out in the woods following the signal of our downed insturments, which we hoped were still intact. After myself and another girl from our team crossed a hill we saw our bright orange instruments conveniently placed in a pine tree near some sand dunes. It was a great moment of discovery and triumph for our teams that we had finally found our hard work still working properly.

Here is our team and professors posing by our instruments in the pine tree, I'm on the far right with a white toboggin on

Once we had recoved all of our instrument and cameras we took them back to campus to process our film and look at our data. We all were able to record accurate temperature and climate data, however, most of the teams cameras didn't produce any good results due to technical problems with our cameras. Originally we had our cameras wired to take photos every few minutes in the air, but it seemed that some of the teams did a bad soldering job and the cameras didn't work at all. Luckily, the team that I was in were able to get some good results from our camera. They aren't comparable to the High-res imagery the Spanish students recorded, but it was still amazing for us at the time.

This is the best photo our disposable, hacked, cameras were able to get. You can see the layers of the atmosphere and the curvature of the earth in this photo.

In the end we were all very pleased with the work we did, and everyone benifitted from an excellent learning experience. At the time we did this project, I was still a Computer Science major and quite unhappy with the subject. The next year I changed my major to Geography and Geographic Information Science, and haven't looked back since. That decision could have very well been influenced by the fun I had doing this project with Dr. John Chadwick and our class that semester.