Reaching For The Stars – Launching High Altitude Balloon

Students design, build, and launch instrumented high-altitude balloons that carry their experiments into the stratosphere. After a five-day project-based lab on the vocabulary and challenges of balloon flight, students plan payload layouts and design a power-management experiment to determine which batteries perform best in extreme cold and altitude. Flight data on altitude, temperature, speed, and climb rate are analyzed to improve each successive launch and are shared with Tennessee Technological University’s Electrical Engineering Department to support ongoing research.

Students will be able to:

• Define criteria and constraints for a payload that must operate in extreme environmental conditions.
• Design and conduct an experiment comparing battery performance under extreme cold and altitude.
• Interpret flight data (altitude, temperature, speed, climb rate) to draw conclusions about payload and battery performance.
• Evaluate the successes and failures of a launch and propose design improvements for future flights.