Students' weather balloon from Michigan lands (probably) in Brackenridge

From live leeches to building model rockets, a lot happens in Joe Graber’s Michigan high school science class.

The most recent project is a weather balloon experiment that could lead to a scavenger hunt in the Brackenridge area.

According to a Facebook post by Carrie Balk, a weather balloon launched by students of Three Rivers High School in Michigan landed somewhere in the area of Prospect Cemetery and Freeport Road. Balk is the principal of the high school.

“Students in our science classes launched a weather balloon (Wednesday) and have been watching it travel and collect data,” Balk said in her post.

She asked for anyone who might locate the balloon to email her at cbalk@trschools.org.

Graber said students were attempting to send the balloon to the stratosphere to burst while tracking its journey with data. Graber said he was inspired to start the experiment after reading about a similar experiment in a STEM publication.

He was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Michigan Science Teachers Association to buy the balloons and other equipment for the project. The class had to postpone the launch four times before it was time to hit the skies.

“It’s taken a year-and-a-half, almost two years of research to get to this point,” Graber said.

Wednesday afternoon, students prepped the balloon by filling it with helium, attaching a parachute for when it drops from the sky, a camera, a heater and a tracker.

“It didn’t go up,” Graber said.

This was the first technical difficulty to occur during the experiment.

The class quickly realized the equipment weighed the balloon down too much to launch. Graber made the executive decision to strip some of the equipment and relaunching.

“I stripped everything off of it that I could except for the tracker,” Graber said. “I took all the weight off of it that I could, then it flew pretty decent.”

Despite this, Graber quickly realized the balloon was ascending at about a third of the rate intended.

Ultimately, the balloon did not take the path it was supposed to. When the balloon should’ve reached a much higher altitude much faster, it had only risen about 35,000 feet in the first 90 minutes after its launch.

Due to the moisture in the air, Graber theorized the balloon got wet and then began to freeze as its altitude increased.

“It just got too heavy,” Graber said.

At a certain point, the balloon quickly dropped to 1,000 feet, according to the tracker. It began rising at a certain point, but not nearly as quickly it needed to.

“When it got to Pennsylvania, that’s twice as far as we expected it to go,” Graber said. “It never got up to the stratosphere like it should have.”

He expected the balloon to land somewhere in northern Ohio.

Balk included images of the balloon’s flight path in her post to help people locate the balloon. According to Google Maps, Three Rivers High School is more 350 miles away from the balloon’s expected landing site in Brackenridge.

“I apologize on behalf of our students and staff if it’s on your roof,” Balk wrote.

Graber said the balloon has yet to be found, but he’s been in contact with local people to help locate it.

He said there’s a chance that the balloon could be somewhere outside of Brackenridge since it hasn’t been located and the tracker has stopped reporting.

Graber said his class intends to launch another balloon in the coming weeks.

“I have everything set to launch another balloon,” he said. “This time we’re going to send a much larger balloon than what we saw this time.”

The experiment is just one example of Graber’s hands-on teaching style.

Teaching ninth through 12th grade students and overseeing science clubs for the past six years has led Graber to teach mostly through projects.

“It’s a live and learn (situation),” Graber said about the balloon project. “This is our first time. My kids were trying to scientifically figure out how to do this, and at some point you have to bite the bullet and try it.

“I think my kids learned a lot that day.”