Small Research Balloons in a Physics Course for Education Majors

At The Catholic Univ. of America, we teach an experimental physics course entitled Physics 240: The Sun-Earth Connection, which is designed for the undergraduate education major. The emphasis is on providing hands-on experience and giving the students an exciting experience in physics. As part of this course, in the Spring 2013 semester, we instituted a project to plan, build, launch, and retrieve a small (~1.3 kg) research balloon payload. The payload flown was a small GPS unit that sent its position to an Internet site, a small wide-angle high-resolution video camera, and an analog refrigerator thermometer placed in the field of view of the camera. All data were stored on the camera sim-card. Students faced the problems of flying a small research balloon in the congested, densely populated Northeast Corridor of the US. They used computer simulators available on the Web to predict the balloon path and flight duration given velocities for the Jet Stream and ground winds, as well as payload mass and amount of helium in the balloon. The first flight was extremely successful. The balloon was launched 140 km NW of Washington DC near Hagerstown, MD and touched down 10 miles (16 km) NW of York, PA, within 1.6 km of what was predicted. The balloon reached 73,000 ft (22,000 m) and the thermometer indicated temperatures as low as -70 degrees Fahrenheit (-57 C) during the flight. Further balloon flights are planned in conjunction with this course. Additional exercises and experiments will be developed centered around these flights. Besides learning that science can be exciting, students also learn that science is not always easily predictable, and that these balloon flights give an understanding of many of problems that go into real scientific space missions. This project is supported in part by an educational supplement to NASA grant NNX10AC56G