High schoolers' balloon probes 'near-space'

ESSEX JUNCTION – The big balloon leaped from tethers at 9:40 a.m. Within several minutes it was a shrinking white speck in the blue sky.

After an hour and a half, the lighter-than-air craft was at 107,000 feet above Earth's surface.

That's 20 miles high, in the stratosphere: roughly three times the altitude achieved by commercial jetliners.

Those responsible for the balloon's launch on Wednesday — several dozen high school students and their instructors at the Center for Technology in Essex Junction — gawked skyward, mostly quiet.

They appeared to be saluting. More likely, they shielded their eyes against the sun.

An onboard GoPro video camera recorded the onlookers' amazement.

A few seconds later, the camera captured a great deal more.

Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains hove into view.

Then, gradually, rose the curvature of the planet against deep, dark space and what science instructor Jennifer Liguori calls "our thin blue line" of Earth's atmospheric support system.

Cameras captured the parachute-slowed descent, too.

After about two and a half hours aloft, the six-pack cooler-sized payload plunked down, unseen, in a remote field about 70 miles to the southeast as the crow flies.

Which way the wind blows

The school's participation in the international Global Space Balloon Challenge succeeded, Liguori said, by giving shape and excitement to a convergence of disciplines.

Education specialists bundle that approach as "STEM," shorthand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Practically speaking, and tapping into students' enthusiasm for tangible results, Liguori said, "It's a project that ties it all together."

The launch site consisted of a plastic tarp on a ball field and the tail-gate of a hatchback.

A helium tank was wheeled up. Over the course of 15 minutes, the metal vessel wheezed its contents into the white bag.

A trio of wranglers held the ropes taut and fought wind gusts. They wore latex gloves to protect the balloon's delicate skin from the weakening effects of body oils.

"Unique and cool"

The lift-off brought the Essex crew into the company of like-minded tinkerers worldwide: 290 teams in 47 countries have registered for expeditions, according to the Global Space Balloon Challenge website.

The challenge is the brainchild of students of aerospace engineering at Stanford University — champions of low-cost citizen science.

The group offers prizes for teams that "go beyond traditional high altitude ballooning and do something unique and cool."

The Essex crew aimed for photographic coolness.

Somewhere, over the radar

To get there, said junior Seth Elkins, they had to calculate how their gear, housed in a Styrofoam cooler nicknamed "George," might survive some crazy weather.

And how the box might give a heads-up to its minders.

The flight conformed closely to predictive computer modeling, Liguori said later.

The onboard GPS system's stability system, a gimbal designed by students and printed on a 3-D printer, worked like a charm.

Video and still-camera images survived the voyage — although one of the cameras seems to have bitten the dust, Liguori said.

Hand-warmer packets kept the student-programmed Arduino microprocessor sufficiently toasty. The system had been field-tested down to -10 degrees in the school's freezer, Liguori noted.

A foot-wide, aluminum foil-lined radar reflector, mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration and attached like a kite's tail, apparently warned other aircraft from coming too close.

George vanishes

Glitches in the flight added up to mere inconvenience, reported Steven Herr, the computer animation and web page design instructor who co-piloted the near-space project.

As expected, the ground control team lost track of the balloon at higher altitudes: Civilian-grade GPS devices are designed for terrestrial use, Herr said.

The sensor that monitored atmospheric pressure seized up when temperatures sank to minus-30 degrees — and with it, the trigger for a heating element designed to sever the balloon's connection with the cargo at 95,000 feet.

George, the little orange-painted cargo box, kept rising until the balloon's latex skin burst, at 107,000 feet.

And then?

Space mud

No piece of cake.

"It was crazy," Liguori summarized the next morning.

She and Herr and four of their students gave chase in a school van. When they reached the wilds of Bradford, they found themselves without cell service — and therefore unable to refine their search.

The search crew plied a dozen unmarked, unpaved roads.

The van succumbed to mud and sank to its undercarriage. It had to be towed to dryer ground.

"We met a lot of friendly Vermonters," Herr noted. "We walked through muddy fields for 2 hours. We never gave up."

About 5:30 p.m. — more than 8 hours after the launch — the search party found the battered but intact capsule perched on Degoosh Hill.

Contact Joel Banner Baird at 802-660-1843 or joelbaird@FreePressMedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/vtgoingup.