Space Grant Consortium holds successful weather balloon launch with K-12 students

The North Dakota Space Grant Consortium (NDSGC), housed at the University of North Dakota in the Space Studies Department (SpSt), held the seventh annual engineering design program for middle and high school North Dakota students, called the Near-Space Balloon Competition (NSBC).

NSBC allows students to build their own experiments, launch them on a helium-filled balloon into the stratosphere, and learn how to use GPS to track everything back to the ground. Along with the Space Studies Department’s graduate students, these North Dakota students follow the payloads throughout the flight in chase vehicles and use Iridium satellites to find its landing location. One month after recovering their data, these students produce a final report, just like real NASA scientists and engineers.

This year, we flew ten payloads on a 2000-gram high altitude balloon. The participating North Dakota teams were from Garrison, Tower City, Grand Forks, West Fargo, Wahpeton, and Kindred. On Friday, Dec. 1, the teams traveled to UND for integration night, where they worked in hands-on stations to finalize their experiments and prepare themselves for the upcoming flight. On Saturday, Dec. 2 the SpSt launch team, NSBC teams, superintendents, and even the nearby sheriff convened at the launch site at Northern Cass School in Hunter, N.D.

The balloon was launched at 9:50 a.m., ascended to 80,266 feet, and was successfully tracked and recovered in the Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota. The students were fully engaged and excited throughout the entire mission, even saying their college aspirations are now set on UND!

This project would not have been possible without the dedicated graduate students and support from the Space Studies Department and the North Dakota Space Grant Consortium.

NSBC 2017 Video: https://goo.gl/Eafyuc
North Dakota Space Grant Consortium: http://ndspacegrant.und.edu