If you saw a balloon flying around Ames this morning, you don’t need to worry; it really wasn’t a UFO.

At 6:30 a.m. on Friday , about 50 college and high school students, professors and NASA representatives gathered on the field between Howe Hall and the Design Building.

They were there to watch Caenorhabditis elegans, which are tiny worms living in the soil of rotting vegetation, be launched into the stratosphere. The last launch was Sunday morning.

The project was undertaken by the High Altitude Balloon Experiments in Technology team, which is a division of the Spacecraft Systems and Operations Laboratory. It was a joint venture among NASA, Stanford University, Iowa State and a group of high school students from across the country.

ISU and NASA researchers said they expected the worms to be paralyzed when they came down from their high altitude.

“The experiment is testing to find the reason why muscles lose mass when in space or a person is in a coma,” said Jessica Wallace, junior in elementary education. “We’re working to find a solution to this problem,” Wallace said.

Around 6:35 a.m., the lift of the experiment, a huge latex balloon, was filled with helium.

Three students supported the balloon while it filled with helium until it could support itself.

By 6:40 a.m., the balloon was bounding in the wind and the first helium tank had been exhausted.

“This team is so professional, it’s amazing,” said Dr. Greg Kovacs, professor of electrical engineering and medicine at Stanford University.

He is also the director of medical device technologies for the Astrobionics Program at the NASA Ames Research Center and principal investigator of the Stanford-NASA National Center for Space Biological Technologies.

Kovacs and his team have been to Iowa State three times now.

“We’re the geeks that put the stuff in the little box,” he told the assembly.

He asked everyone to step in and look at the payload before it was sealed inside a sturdy, light blue Styrofoam box boasting NASA decals. The payload weighed about 12 pounds.

Chris Storment, an engineer from Stanford, explained there were three cameras in the payload box: One watching the worms, the second looking to the horizon and the third looking toward the ground.

He said these were to monitor how the flight progressed and see the effects of the weightlessness on the worms.

Select high school students were flown to Ames from across the county to watch the launch. Ashley Blemke, a senior at Menomenie High School in Menomenie, Wis., said she helped count the worms in her biotechnology class last term.

“We can’t really help with the launch, but we’re here to help as the recovery team,” Blemke said.

By 7 a.m., the payload was attached to the balloon and was ready for launch.

At 7:02 a.m., Kovacs called for a countdown from 10. Once the end of the countdown was reached, Thomas Meador, a junior Investigator for the HABET team, pushed the launch button for a few seconds and the strings tethering the balloon to cement blocks fell off one-by-one and box took off.

Carol Conley, Senior Scientific Advisor for the HABET team, said the executed results are to see whether the worms moved more slowly or were completely paralyzed during the few seconds of freefall between the time the balloon popped and the parachute opened.

Chris Uhl, senior in aerospace engineering and flight director in training for the missions flown this weekend, said the computer model predicted a burst height for the balloon at 117,000 feet.

“The balloons tend to burst a little earlier because of the varying structures of the balloons,” Uhl said. “This balloon burst at 98,230 feet.”

Wallace said the retrieval of the payload could be challenging in trying to determine the exact position where the balloon would land.

“When the balloon bursts, the ideal situation is the recovery team is under it,” Wallace said.

“The tracking programs were all written by students here at Iowa State.”

Matt Clausman, junior in electrical engineering and member of the launch team, said this flight traveled 39.8 miles, but said this was by line of sight from launch pad, not the actual distance traveled.

It took two hours and 15 minuted for the balloon to reach above 100,000 feet and burst.

The cost of a single flight is roughly $5,000 to $10,000, he said.

It was paid for jointly through Iowa State, NASA and Stanford, though specific numbers were not available.

The worms landed near Newton around 9 a.m. ISU, Stanford and NASA scientists will examine the worms to see how they fared in their flight.

“It went well,” Uhl said. “We recovered the spacecraft and we were able to receive data throughout the flight.”