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Ready to Launch: ODCS launching weather balloon project Saturday

Fri, 11/11/2022 - 1:40 pm
  • (THOMAS WALLNER | THE GRAHAM LEADER) Open Door Christian School students work on the base of the weather balloon before launching the project in May 2021 from Graham Municipal Airport. The students will be launching the next project Saturday, Nov. 12.  
    (THOMAS WALLNER | THE GRAHAM LEADER) Open Door Christian School students work on the base of the weather balloon before launching the project in May 2021 from Graham Municipal Airport. The students will be launching the next project Saturday, Nov. 12.
  • (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | OPEN DOOR CHRISTIAN SCHOOL) The Bedford Fire Department poses with the Open Door Christian School weather balloon project that was launched in May 2021 and recovered in Bedford. The project this year also has a tracker to locate it after it takes off Saturday, Nov. 12.  
    (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | OPEN DOOR CHRISTIAN SCHOOL) The Bedford Fire Department poses with the Open Door Christian School weather balloon project that was launched in May 2021 and recovered in Bedford. The project this year also has a tracker to locate it after it takes off Saturday, Nov. 12.
editor@grahamleader.com

Twenty-two students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade from Open Door Christian School will be launching a high-altitude balloon Saturday as part of a STEM project. The project will be expanding this year to include more experiments and a public launch event at Graham Municipal Airport.

ODCS Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Director Claire Meschkat implemented the project last year to help students use their knowledge and abilities for something meaningful. The students use real-world applications and utilize engineering design, technology, science and teamwork to complete the project.

“This project provides a tremendous opportunity for the students to apply what they have learned in the STEM program at Open Door to a real-world, hands-on experience,” Meschkat wrote. “Two times every day weather balloons, just like the one our students are launching, are released simultaneously from about 900 locations around the world. This is what we use to measure and predict weather patterns and our students get to experience it first hand.”

The students will design a payload that is lifted into the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere by a high-altitude balloon. Two GoPro cameras will be attached to the balloon to capture footage of its journey. The payload will have instruments attached which measure temperature, pressure and humidity and will be used to analyze two science experiments on the payload.

“Last time, we sent up a raw chicken egg and recorded video of the egg exploding then freezing against a backdrop of the curvature of the earth at 83,000 feet above the earth’s surface. This year, the ODCS student body voted to send up a packet of pop rocks that will be exposed to the atmospheric elements and a rubber bouncy ball whose elasticity will be compared to a duplicate ball that is remaining on the ground,” Meschkat wrote. “The high altitude balloon will be filled with helium to lift the payload into the air and will begin at a diameter of about 6 feet. As the balloon ascends, it will expand due to the decrease in pressure and burst after stretching to about 30 feet in diameter. At that point, a parachute will open and provide a safe descent for the payload back to the ground somewhere in North Texas. There will be two trackers on the payload that will be sending location data to the students who will be riding with Laci Nelle, the STEM teacher, and LeAnn Stetson, who is our school secretary, to go recover the payload.”

For the full story, see the Wednesday, Nov. 9 edition of The Graham Leader.