Southeast to launch high-altitude weather balloon on Wednesday

Editor's note: the following story has been edited to correct the specific on-campus location of the launch. The Southeast Missourian regrets the error.

The sky over Southeast Missouri State University on Wednesday afternoon will include a high-altitude StratoStar weather balloon on its way to near-space during a tethered launch in preparation for the region’s Aug. 21 full solar eclipse.

The latex weather balloon, 6 to 8 feet across, will be filled with helium and contain a camera, tracking equipment and box of 20 experiments weighing no more than 63 grams each. It will launch from the former band practice field on Wednesday.

Southeast’s STEM education initiative will host Kaci Heins, education manager with NASA’s Space Center Houston, and Jason Krueger, president and founder of StratoStar, for the launch, said Diana Rogers-Adkinson, dean of the College of Education.

Heins, a Southeast graduate, said she is excited to work with teachers from 15 area school districts during the Collaborative Regional Education, or CORE, Academy conference Tuesday and Wednesday at Southeast, developing the experiments to send up with the balloon.

After the launch, teachers will track the balloon’s progress using their smartphones and, with their students, analyze data and experiment results after payload recovery, Heins said.

Krueger said each launch has to coordinate with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“There are rules,” he said.

“It takes about an hour and a half for the balloon to reach 100,000 feet,” Krueger said.

The balloon then pops, and the equipment and experiments will drop back to Earth.

Heins said this is a great educational opportunity because of its hands-on, real-time experience.

“Everyone learns best by doing,” Heins said, and this will afford teachers and their students the ability to do that.

Krueger said this balloon launch will be a great practice run for the untethered launch in August.

“These balloons will get to over 100,000 feet, above 99 percent of the atmosphere,” Krueger said.

“We send a camera up with the balloon, show the students their experiments actually in space,” Heins said. “They’ll never forget seeing that.”

Krueger said this balloon launch isn’t just about building experiments to launch into space.

It’s also about collaborative learning, teaching the scientific method, “work on what we call 21st-century skills,” he said. “You can’t do this by yourself. You’re working with limited space, a very specific time frame, communication, collaboration, problem solving.”

Experiments such as this one also expose students to career paths they may not have considered for themselves, Heins said.

“Even jobs that don’t exist yet,” she said. “It’s exciting to put them on pathways.”

mniederkorn@semissourian.com

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