Project Proposal Our STEM II project is a two semester project in which we plan to send a weather balloon into the stratosphere in order to calculate the wind patterns throughout the launch. While in the stratosphere we plan to document the journey through pictures and film. By the end of the year our goal is to have run three separate launches. Through these launches we plan to have enough data to calculate horizontal distance traveled by our payload as caused by the wind. This data could be applied to future launches in predicting their path. We plan to send up three balloons with a payload attached containing different masses in order to validate the data collected. The change in mass allows us to mathematically calculate the horizontal distance traveled for other larger objects that we won’t launch. Our payload will contain: a GoPro (intended to document the ascension and descension), Arduino GPS, a battery pack used to power the instruments on board, and a frame to house all the instruments. All of this will be carried up by a weather balloon filled with helium. At the end of our project we will present our results to a board of professionals as well as sharing the data with our contact at NASA.
"Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are." -felix baumgartner