Weather Balloon Launch: Mission Control
Post by Natasha Wilkerson
March 20, 2015
As we continued in our adventure into HAB (High Altitude Ballooning), our main challenge was channeling 50 eager middle school students into productive work! We decided to tackle this by splitting students into 4 teams based on the main tasking involved. Each team was lead by a Director and Project Manager. Below is a description of each team.
Director: Provide leadership to complete project goals and assign tasking to team members.
Project Manager: Take attendance, organize materials, and keep everyone on task.
Meeting with Mission Control Team
Mission Control
This teams focuses on the engineering aspects of the project. Students are tasked with building the payload and executing the balloon launch.
Research weather balloon launches
Determine FAA regulations
Determine launch procedures
Create pre-launch check list
Create safety protocol
Set-up equipment and practice launch sequence
Launch the balloon!
Mission Control working on the payload.
Mission Specialist
This team uses the scientific method to design and execute an experiment for space!
Research the upper atmosphere
Design experiment to send to near-space
Build payload to house experiment
Determine how to collect and present data from experiment
Disassemble payload and recover data
Recovery Team
This team is responsible for retrieving the balloon after launch using GPS technology.
Research Spot II Satellite Tracker
Research balloon recovery procedures
Determine equipment requirements
Create identifiers for equipment
Develop retrieval plan
Compile GPS data and create map
recovery team reviewing the Spot ii GPS tracker
Meteorology
This team selects launch site and collects meteorological data during flight.
Research weather balloon launches
Research the upper atmosphere
Examine map and wind forecasts to determine launch site
Determine sensors for payload to collect flight data
Collect data and present results on flight
Click here to read our other blog posts on launching a weather balloon or watch the video below that takes you on a deep dive into the amazing project!
Planning to launch your own weather balloon? Tackle the ultimate STEM project with our all-inclusive classroom guide to launching a weather balloon PLUS links to a shared Google Drive folder with TONS of extra resources! Based on three years of successful weather balloon experience with over 300 middle school students, this guide is everything you need to design a payload, select an experiment, launch, and recover a weather balloon from a 100,000-foot journey to the edge of space!
