All the cold weather has us thinking about back to summer, especially the Eclipse Ballooning Project last August! The photos from the Eclipse Ballooning Project are now avaliable here.
On August 21, 2017, NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium, in conjuction with other Space Grant Consortium from around the country, participated in the Eclipse Ballooning Project. This project focused on sending 57 high altitude balloons 100,000 feet above the earth during totality. Most of the high altitude balloons were equipped with recording devices to capture videos and images of the eclipse during totality. This was the first undertaking of it’s kind. Previously, an eclipse had been filmed, but it was not transmitted live and it did not have the same vast coverage that this project employed.
The CTSGC team was comprised of students and faculty from the University of Hartford and the University of Bridgeport, along with staff and volunteer mentors from the Discovery Museum and Planetarium and students and teachers from the Fairchild Wheeler Interdistrict Magnet Campus in Bridgeport, CT. Members of the team traveled to Kentucky to view the solar eclipse and launch three balloons in the path of totality. Together, the balloons carried cameras, a small astrobiology experiment, and a weather recording instrument. The results from the astrobiology experiment was used to help NASA understand how certain bacterias would function in extreme environments, like in outerspace or on the surface of Mars. The results from the weather recording instrument were used to investigate changes in temperature in the atmosphere during the eclipse.
Photos of the eclipse: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmb9eTWo