UW students launch balloon from airport

Earth and space science class project gets off the ground

A class of University of Washington students had the opportunity to see their education take flight over the weekend.

Students in UW earth and space sciences professor Robert Holzworth's Access to Space class gathered on the runway of the Grant County International Airport in order to launch an unmanned balloon Saturday morning.

"This is a UW 200-level sophomore class for majors or non-majors," Holzworth said. "The idea is to introduce the students to the process and the science associated with space science. The course involves lectures, homework and reading associated with, what is the atmosphere? How does the atmosphere work? Where does the energy flow? Why is it warmer above the tropopause than it is below the tropopause?"

The class is Earth and Space Sciences 205.

Holzworth's class teaches the students about the layer structure of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, the magnetosphere, solar wind, the sun and its effects on the earth's environment. They also come in and learn beginning technical and electronic skills, such as sautering, in order to build an instrument with a transmitter that will be launched to measure temperature. That project serves as practice for the final project.

"We launched that from campus a few weeks ago and it went to Canada," he said. "They found it in Edmonton. It was supposed to go up and pop, but it must not have had enough gas."

For the final project, the culmination of the students' laboratory work, three teams built instruments that will produce a measurement that changes as their altitude increases. Holzworth said the students would be taking measurements on electric field, magnetic field, infrared and optical sensors and humidity at different altitudes.

"Also we have a video on board," he said. "It's on Channel 60. You can unplug your cable and plug in an antenna and watch our balloon video. It has an overlay with the GPS location of the balloon — altitude, latitude, longitude and so forth. That's how we'll track it, and we'll be able to just read off right where the balloon is at any given time."

Another UW faculty member said that the video may appear on Channel 58.

Teacher's assistant Michael Kokorowski said that the class was hoping to see the balloon get up to about 80,000 feet.

The class will track and retrieve the balloon and instruments when they come down thanks to a locator beacon, said Port of Moses Lake executive manager David Senne. He said that this is another example of the kind of things that the Port supports in the high-tech area. The Port had students from the class launch a balloon last year as well.

"If you look for a facility that can support what the ground support facilities and be able to have a controlled launch through a control tower and then have open spaces around it, we're kind of on the short list of airports in the state that can support it," Senne said. "You have airports that are out in the open areas, but most of those don't have control towers."

"It's pretty exciting, it's pretty cool," said freshman Taylor Westphal, who was one of the people holding the balloon right before launch. "Not like anything I'd ever done before. It was pretty lifting."

"I feel awesome, it was amazing," said freshman Amanda Darby. "It was kind of an ending to the experience. It's kind of like, class is now kind of concluding. Group members worked really hard towards this."