High Altitude Balloon Experiment Ideas
I am helping out with a high-altitude balloon program, where we will be launching multiple balloons a year and we're encouraging students to come up with experiments. Sometimes they have great ideas... and other times, not so much. I was hoping to get some additional ideas to serve as inspiration for when the students are struggling to come up with a cool experiment. If you've done something, or heard of something that would be interesting to college-age students, I would love to try to incorporate it. Right now, I have a number of Propeller Activity Boards and smattering of sensors, but I'm not necessarily limited to what I have on-hand. I would also be happy to get data to you if you're interested in analyzing it and want to use this as an opportunity for a free balloon launch for your idea. Anyway, any inspirational ideas would be appreciated...
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I bought a neat old radiosonde at a swap meet years ago, marked Army Signal Corps. Still have it at home somewhere, just the white box portion of this package: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Science-Fair-Project-Old-Meteorological-Balloon-Radiosonde-ready-to-go/331060320281#ht_6569wt_1235
The PropFORTH data logger can log several times each second, uses a SD adapter as SD slot, and will run for months without filling up a 4Gig micro SD card. The realtime clock runs off the prop internal counter (to save the cost of an additional treal time clock part) but can drift with temperature. So measureing the and/or setting the drift compensation dynamically based on temperature might be fun.
The PropFORTH inertial measurement unit (IMU) users the GY-80, which is cheap on Ebay and has 10 degrees of freedom. Right now it just logs the raw data from GY-80, but we are working on a kalman filter, that might be an appropriate project for a college kid.
And of course one could quickly write new drivers for whatever other sensor or actuators of interest, as this is what forth is all about.
Most excellent idea, Rich! Temp, humidity & pressure are variables that could be quantified and tested. Assuming the Ping sensor performance is constant under those varying conditions.
more at different altitudes; what kind of pollutants, if any, are present at different altitudes; measure different ozone levels at different altitudes; check to see what elements
are more avaliable at different altitudes, if any. :blank:
Some ideas:
1. count pulses from a Geiger counter and try to detect the Pfotzer maximum (peak gamma intensity)
2. build a multi-band photometer using LEDS and try to detect differences in reflected or incoming light (see Nuts and Volts "Near Space series of articles)
3. Build a sun direction sensor (also in Nuts and Volts)
4. Build a particle capturing device actuated by a servo and try to capture "cosmic dust" (iron particles from space)
5. Identify the temperature shift at the tropopause.
6. Use an electronic compass or the parallax gyro to detect rotation, and take photographs only when the payload is rotating slowly
We have done all of these and others over the past years in the ballooning program for HS students at the University of New Hampshire. We launched 5 student experiment packages today, with six Propellers on board.
Let me know if you need any more specific help.