Science class to launch weather balloon in St. Regis
ST. REGIS – A teacher at the St. Regis High School will be able to teach her future science students about a much wider array of subjects after she received a grant last week to purchase and launch a high altitude weather balloon.
The $15,000 grant attained by science teacher Chris West will provide her the opportunity to teach students about weather, environmental conditions in the upper reaches of the atmosphere as well as mapping and other scientific disciplines.
West said she was excited about the opportunity to teach her students using the newly acquired technology.
West also said the launching of the weather balloon would hopefully be something the entire community could participate in.
“It goes up to 100,000 feet,” West said. “It has three HD video cameras. It has radiation detectors. It has a complete set of weather instruments so it will measure humidity and barometric pressure and temperature. It also has a GPS tracker on it. We will fill the balloon with helium and it takes about an hour for it to reach 100,000 feet where it will transmit information back to us. When it gets to a certain height it expands and then a parachute will bring it back down and we will have equipment in a chase car to find it.”
West said she plans on having one day a week set aside to study information sent back by the weather balloon.
“I want to have one day a week be weather balloon day,” West said. “Most of the classes will learn how to use the equipment. We want to learn from our own data what is going on at 100,000 feet. We want to have a community launch. Once we have gone through all that data, we will have a presentation at a dinner for the community.”
According to West, the first launch could take place in the fall with subsequent launches coming in the spring and summer of 2016. She said she expected the study of information transmitted by the balloon to be informative as well as an entertaining educational experience for students.
“It’s going to be fun,” West said. “We will try to launch in October but it will all depend on the weather. We don’t want it to get caught in the jet stream because it could go thousands of miles so we will have to really careful about when we launch it.”
The grant came from the Toshiba Corporation.
West said she was hoping students would get a lot of educational mileage out of the project.
“We will actually be able to see the curvature of the earth from the cameras,” West said. “I think that will be a really powerful experience for them to see that kind of view. I want them to see a bigger world out there than the one they see everyday. That’s always my goal. We are excited. The kids are excited.”