NASA… Betterments Begat For Balloons

NASA selected four high school teams as finalists in the Balloonsat High Altitude Flight competition. Their experiments will be the payload aboard a NASA weather balloon that will launch May 25-27.


The balloon will be sent to the near space environment of the stratosphere, an altitude of approximately 100,000 feet. The competition is hosted by NASA‘s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The high school teams and the names of their experiments are:

• Charlottesville High School, Charlottesville, Va. — “The Effects of Near-Space Conditions on Escherichia Coli Bacteria”
• Upper St. Clair High School, Upper St. Clair, Pa. — “The Effect of Near-Space Conditions on Microbial Life Forms”
• Stansbury High School, West Jordan, Utah — “Thermal Moisture Penetration”
• North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, N.C. — “Variations on Polyethylene Hard Disk Radiation Shields”

During flight days, the teams will release, track and recover their experiments. They also will present a report on their findings at Glenn’s Balloonsat Symposium. One team’s experiment will be judged the best, and Glenn representatives will present an award to them at their school next fall. These four finalists were selected from 10 teams of students in grades nine through 12 from around the country that submitted proposals. They each received funding for development of their experiment and travel expenses for four students and an advisor to attend flight days at Glenn.

The Balloonsat High Altitude Flight program is one of many educational outreach programs to stimulate interest in science, technology, engineering and math disciplines critical to NASA’s future missions. The competition is sponsored by the Educational Programs Office at Glenn; Teaching from Space, a NASA education office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; and the Ohio Space Grant Consortium, Cleveland.