…on February 15th by a group of MacArthur High School (Decatur, Illinois) physics students, was hopelessly lost on its maiden voyage. That is, until teacher Kevin Aten received an email from the person who had found it.
“Greenville?” Aten said, reading from his computer screen. “They found it in Greenville?”
“No way,” said Sam Funk, one of the students who is part of the project.
MacArthur seniors Dakwan Scruggs, left, and Sam Funk place a camera inside a satellite they helped build. The camera continuously records about three hours of footage many miles above the Earth’s surface.
Aten said the students wrote a grant to the Decatur Public Schools Foundation for enough money to build and launch three satellites. A camera was mounted inside a Styrofoam cooler, and a cell-phone equipped with GPS tracking that would send the information to Aten’s phone was also placed in the cooler. The weather balloon was attached to the top.
The first launch was aborted when the capsule didn’t rise high enough and the group had to go in search of more helium. Turns out Wal-Mart carries helium, and they bought some and returned to the launch site to try again. That time, it soared skyward appropriately. The plan was for the capsule to reach a height of 20 miles, at which point they knew they’d lose GPS contact, but when it came back down, they would regain contact and be able to find it, Aten said.
“I was really looking forward to being able to see the curve of the Earth (on the pictures),” said student Maggie Curlin.
The plan is to send up the other two capsules, one at a time, over the next six or eight weeks, possibly from different locations, and compare the results. They’ll likely place the camera differently on each one. Mac 1’s camera pointed out the side of the device. The next one will probably point down, through the bottom. They plan to post their videos on YouTube and the district’s cable Channel 22.
