NASA’s Space Trek 2021 Weather Balloon Project
NASA SpaceTrek Academy is a program that enhances the skills of students in meteorology, telemetry, and NASA protocols for taking different variables into account in mission planning. Our team’s focus (2021 team) was to learn how to integrate and test payload equipment that we ourselves assemble. The program splits participants into sub-teams that focus on a particular experiment. These include Flight Director, Safety Officer, Payload Integration, Launch Operations, and Meteorology roles. During this experience I was elected as Flight director, where I participated and oversaw all projects on the weather balloon. My responsibilities were to lead my team, ensure the success of our experiments and the weather balloon, keep my team on task , and be a liaison for external help from our mentors at NASA’s Kennedy space Center. During this academy there were three major experiments that were to be performed; Solar Powered Arduino, PongSat, and Geiger-Counter.
Our project consisted of:
Solar cell experiment: set to gauge whether solar cells are able to generate a greater amount of electricity or generate electricity at a faster rate when placed in high altitudes.
PongSat experiment: where the three proposed ideas for the PongSat experiments. One is placing a mini marshmallow into a ping pong ball and seeing if the marshmallow expands. The second idea, placing undeveloped camera film into a PongSat and seeing the effect of cosmic rays at high altitudes. Lastly, the sound experiment includes two PongSats, one for a “beep” and one to “listen” to see how sound can be affected at high altitudes.
Geiger Counter experiment: which was used to measure radiation with change in altitude and possibly attach different lightweight fabrics/materials in front of the Geiger counter openings to determine what type of material best blocks cosmic radiation.
Advisor: Andrew Gafford
