My colleague and I, who advise our school’s Physics Club, volunteered to share our our experiences over the past two years designing, launching, and retrieving near-space balloons. Last year’s balloon reached an altitude of over 100,000 feet and captured amazing photos, video, and temperature and radiation data. We discussed the technologies involved in near-space ballooning such as GPS receivers, microcontrollers, programmable cameras, and sensors. We also shared different approaches to designing near-space balloons that fit a variety of budgets. Finally, we discussed this year’s project in which younger students are designing and building experiments to be launched as part of this spring’s balloon launch.
The slides we presented are below as is our handout with links to various resources. This is a fantastic project for a group of students to tackle. If you decide to try to launch a balloon, please feel free to contact me.