2016 Elijah High Altitude Balloon Launch Team Summer Proceedings Report

Abstract

The 2016 Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Elijah High Altitude Balloon Launch Team was comprised of students from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, UW-Fox Valley, and Carthage College. This year, a majority of the students involved were discovering the balloon launch experience for the first time. The 2016 Elijah Balloon Launch Team held a meeting for the new members to learn how all of the equipment worked through a practice run using the tools in a trial. The flight location was based on launch predictions ran in the week leading up to the launch. The balloon was launched from Clinton, Wisconsin, and landed near Darien, WI. This launch did not follow the launch prediction as accurately as expected, but the payload was recovered in safely and in good condition and launch reached a peak altitude of 31,021m, which was above our goal of 30,480m. Therefore, the launch was deemed successful.

Engaging Indigenous Youth in Science with the High-Altitude Balloon Experiment

“…Since the early 2000s, post-secondary institutions have been incorporating high-altitude balloon experiments in university science and engineering courses to motivate students (Coleman & Mitchell, 2014;Faltersack, Maraccini, Petrie, & Rasmussen, 2016;Larson, Armstrong, & Hiscock, 2009;Voss & Dailey, 2011). As discussed by Coleman and Mitchell (2014), the high-altitude balloon experiment was initially used specifically in atmospheric science courses; students in those courses would participate in designing atmospheric experiments, launch the balloon, recover the payload, analyze the data, and present the results.…”