News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Steven Peterzen worked with students on their project to launch a weather balloon over Sisters Country.
Up, up and away! The Sisters weather balloon soared to over 80,000 feet and landed near Century Drive outside Bend.
The science process classes at Sisters High School capped their spring trimester studies with the launch of a weather balloon on Friday, June 5.
The students assembled a payload of experiments designed by multiple separate teams, advised by science teacher Rima Givot, student teacher Heidi Gillespie and balloon expert Steven Peterzen. As president of ISTAR Group, Peterzen has international experience in sending up balloons, sometimes with massive payloads. (See http://www.theistargroup.com.)
Accordign to Givot, student experiments included weather monitoring and trajectory tracking; a test of atmospheric pressure change on algae photosynthesis; effects of intense high-altitude light on inks; a test of earthworm survival at altitude; and an investigation of cellular change in flower petals.
Givot said that there was an immediately obvious result to the last experiment.
"There definitely was a change in the cells," she said.
Not all the experiments panned out. The weather monitoring equipment either failed or was not set up correctly; it returned no data. And the balloon - a 600-gram latex unit with a burst altitude of 100,000 feet - did not fly as high as anticipated. It topped out somewhere around 85,000 feet before bursting, due to a heavier payload.
That's all part of the deal though, and a valuable part of the educational experience, allowing students to "recognize the nature of science and design," as Givot put it. Sometimes things fail and you have to go back and tweak the design - sometimes more than once.
The overall mission was a success. Students were able to use GPS to locate the balloon's landing site off Century Drive in the Mt. Bachelor area, and they hiked out to retrieve it.
Givot hopes to repeat the project next year, citing the educational benefits not only of the fundamental scientific processes involved, but also the hands-on team-building that went into the project.
"I will do it again in a second if it works out," she said.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
Reader Comments(0)