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On April 25, students from TechBoston Academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, traveled to UMass Amherst to launch two weather balloons, which the students had designed and built as a year-long engineering project, under the guidance of TechBoston engineering instructor Leo Gomez. The balloons rose an estimated 20 miles into the stratosphere above central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Both balloon capsules were equipped with digital cameras, which the students had modified to shoot photos at 15-second intervals throughout the flight. Each balloon also had on board a GPS-enabled cell phone, which had been programmed to transmit the phone’s GPS coordinates back to a mapping web site. Using this information, Dr. Gomez and an assistant from Machine Science tracked down both balloon capsules several hours after the launch in southern New Hampshire, approximately 70 miles from the launch site. The two balloon capsules were found hanging high in trees, roughly 7 miles apart, and neither could be retrieved before nightfall. However, Dr. Gomez returned three days later, and managed to pull down both capsules, with the assistance of property owners abutting the two sites. The cameras worked perfectly, producing stunning still photographs of the balloons’ flight. We are still working to retrieve data from a logging device aboard the second balloon. (Machine Science developed the data logger in collaboration with computer science students at UMass Lowell and donated it to the project.) The team is hopeful that the data will shed light on exactly how high the balloons traveled and what the atmospheric conditions were like at that altitude. Congratulations to Dr. Gomez and his students on an amazing engineering project!
