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AMS STEM students track down weather balloon after launching it Thursday morning
By ROBERT CONNELLY
AUSTINTOWN
Students of Austintown Middle School gathered Thursday to launch a weather balloon, which traveled from the school to a tree in Johnstown, Pa.
That’s more than 100 miles from Austintown in a town east of Pittsburgh. The triangular base under the balloon included a GPS tracking device, two GoPro cameras and an onboard flight computer as well as a parachute. That computer collected data on air pressure, temperature and humidity, said AMS STEM teacher Jason Freudenberg.
The class will analyze those statistics in coming days.
Ten minutes after the balloon was released, it had traveled about three-quarters of a mile. Teachers and students had downloaded an app onto their phones to track the balloon. Eight students piled into a van with Freudenberg to find and recover the balloon when it landed.
The rest of the class had activities such as predicting where the balloon might land.
Thursday’s launch capped off a nine-week course on “Flight and Space,” which also included building rockets in class. The AMS STEM program, made up of 25 seventh-grade and 25 eighth-grade students, has made strides since it began three years ago. Those early students have graduated on to Fitch High School, where students are finishing a Hovercraft project in an Intro to Engineering class.
Some of those Fitch students, including Nate Spalding and Justin Neff, came back to AMS to give advice while the balloon was inflated and tied off at the bottom to hold the helium inside the balloon and the connection of the balloon to the frame.
“We have a fluke southeast wind, which we never have. ... I don’t even know what’s out there,” Freudenberg guessed as the weather balloon floated away Thursday morning.
He further explained that the goal this year was to reach an altitude of 115,000 feet and that there would be a two-hour period when the GPS wouldn’t be reachable due to its height.
“It’s really cool because you just see all the videos of people doing action stuff [on GoPro cameras] and the fact that we could do that with school is really cool,” said Victor LaRose, 14, an eighth-grade AMS STEM student.
“I really want to see the footage and the curvature of the Earth. ... I want to be an aerospace engineer when I grow up, so this is something I want to do my whole life.”
Fellow teacher Danielle Chine noted that last year the GoPro cameras actually captured the curvature of the Earth.
“Science is something applicable that they can see in real life, and when you look down at the curvature of the Earth at something hours ago was on our own football field, and now it’s in the outer reaches of space, it really makes you see how small the world is,” Chine said.