Balloons aren’t just for children, as a team of 12 ISU students and faculty saw after a successful balloon launch earlier this month. The launch captured a series of high-altitude pictures and gave team members hands-on experience.

The project was sponsored by the Spacecraft Systems and Operations Laboratory, located at 2362 Howe Hall, said Eric Hauber, mission manager of the balloon project, and it served two main purposes.

“One [purpose] was to give students in the [Meteorology] 265 class an opportunity to participate in an actual launch as part of their class work,” said Hauber, junior in aerospace engineering.

The other purpose was to gather photographs of near-space.

“In a sense, it was a training flight,” he said.

The helium-filled latex balloon traveled away from the earth for more than 2 hours before bursting at an altitude of 90,000 feet – about 17 miles.

When the balloon burst, the spacecraft fell by parachute safely to the ground, taking pictures along the way.

Through the use of a global-positioning system receiver on the spacecraft, the team was able to track the balloon’s coordinates. When the balloon landed near Lincoln, Iowa, the recovery team was waiting within a mile of the actual landing zone.

Mike Cook, engineering project director of Spacecraft Systems and Operations Laboratory, said the experiment was valuable to everyone involved.

“Ballooning is actually very complicated,” he said. “Students are taught in classrooms that everything works in a certain way when you put two and two together, but it doesn’t always work that way. This project gave the students hands-on experience, so they could discover on their own what really works.”

Cook said the cost of the spacecraft was about $1,000, and the flight itself cost an additional $500.

“If NASA were to do that exact same project, it would’ve cost about $100,000,” he said. “We would rather do 100 flights that cost $1,000 instead of one flight that costs $100,000.”

Hauber said the project proved to be a smooth experiment, and team members were pleased with the results. However, he said they have experienced some problems in the past.

“We’ve had balloons go into the lake or trees,” he said. “A farmer once even tried to shoot it down with a shotgun. But we haven’t lost a spacecraft yet.”

Other flights are planned for the next few months, including a flight using a new color video camera, Hauber said. The group also plans to work in conjunction with the University of Iowa this summer to build a 40-meter antenna which will be part of NASA’s Mars Express Spacecraft.

“We hope to work on a lot more projects so that we can get national recognition, and also so that we can pay our students for their work here,” Cook said. “However, we have already come a long way. We are one of the main contact points for NASA, which is something to be proud of.”