High-Level Project Summary
We participated in this contest because we launched a weather balloon in august and we want to share our experience. Our team developed within the challenge 'Near Space Near You' a lesson plan and a bill of materials, consisting of all the aspects that we wished we knew before the launch. It is important because it treats all the problems that may occur and how to prevent them, it shows our measurements, data and the necessity of the backup devices, making it easier for anyone out there to launch a weather balloon.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Our lesson plan provides the essential steps and information for a weather balloon stratospheric launch, starting with the documentation, buying the materials and devices, requesting and receiving te approvals from the guvernamental organisations, the actual launch, analysing & processing the data, identifying the problems and finding ways so that they can be avoided in the future. It has the benefit of synthesising the information in order to ease the work of those who want to launch a weather balloon into the stratosphere. We know that our material will inspire students, teachers and science passionate people of any kind to follow this kind of adventure, for research’s sake. We incorporated in the lesson plan the list of the devices needed, including one that we made - a datalogger using Arduino, to which we attached the source code.
Space Agency Data
We didn’t use data from space agencies, but the launch idea was inspired by a NASA’s employee that released such a balloon. We know that NASA periodically launches weather balloons to test the space conditions for satellites and the solar corona. We wished to have an experience at this kind of level and during the hackathon. We managed to prepare a lesson plan to encourage people and help them to reach the stratosphere.
Hackathon Journey
We consider that NASA’s Space Apps Challenge was an interesting and interactive experience, that helped us to get out of our comfort zone and expand our horizons, to bring to a successful end a task, in a short period of time. We are pleased that the solution we communicate within the challenge will be passed on to others. As a team, we consider ourselves curious and ambitious, so this challenge helped us to check another box on our way to knowledge. We managed to work well together and the communication between teammates was excellent. We thank the organising team because it provided us the opportunity to participate at an event of this level.
References
Our resources were:
NASA for inspiration related to the weather balloon launch
Stratoflights - from were we bought all the materials needed for a proper launch (and the ones that we included in the bill of materials and devices). On our lesson plan we attached documents that we received from the Stratoflights team
RISE (Romanian In Space Engineering) - from which we received devices for testing in the harsh conditions of the stratosphere. They also gave us important information about the launch and shared our experience
Kidibot team - that helped us during the entire process (with information related to approvals, actual launch and precautions).
Tags
#stratosphere #innovation #passion #lessonplan #helium #weatherballoon
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.