New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Connecticut students head to Texas for NASA project
Team will launch weather balloons, sensors into the stratosphere to study the solar eclipse
At the Extreme Environments Lab at the University of Bridgeport there’s a palpable air of excitement. Students hover over benches, testing sensitive electronic equipment.
“It’s not live streaming right now,” said Huy Hong, the student team leader and junior engineering major at University of Bridgeport as he peered out from behind a radio receiver dish about the size of a living room flatscreen TV. “During the day of the eclipse we would send this footage straight to YouTube.”
Another student moved to the other side of the room and jumped up and down. Hong says that he sees it — the camera setup in the payload is working as planned.
The students are part of a NASA project to study the upcoming solar eclipse that is occurring April 8. For the past few years they have been designing, building, and testing high-altitude weather balloons. The Bridgeport crew serves as the central hub of a pod of eight Northeastern University teams on the project.
In a couple weeks they head to Texas to launch their balloon in the path of the eclipse. If all goes well, it will float up into the stratosphere, the highest layer of the atmosphere that jet aircraft fly in.
Joining them along the path of the eclipse are 53 teams from 75 colleges and universities across the country. They’re all participants in the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project.
NASA has structured this project as a massive scientific and hands-on educational activity. The teams will take atmospheric data, look at changes in temperature, pressure, wind and whether they can detect atmospheric gravity waves during the eclipse. The balloons will also stress test how far streaming video can be reliably transmitted and test low-cost, low-weight scientific instruments.
The Bridgeport crew is headed by Hong under the mentorship of professor Jani Pallis. She is a mechanical engineer with expertise in aerodynamics. Pallis founded an aerospace engineering company, Cislunar Aerodynamics, that develops engineering educational materials and has worked with NASA on many different projects.
“One big thing about this is, you’ve got computer science, engineering mechanical and electrical … you don’t do space projects with just one major. It’s interdisciplinary,” said Pallis. “Not everybody knows everything so you learn from each other.”
This is the second time the team will head to Texas to launch a scientific balloon during an eclipse. The same team sent a balloon up during 2023’s annular eclipse. The upcoming total eclipse in April will be the last opportunity to study an eclipse in the contiguous United States for about two decades.
Pallis is enthusiastic about the balloon project and her students seem to feed on that. She’s excited that they can do something big and real with their hands.
“Ask them! They don’t like my lectures,” joked Pallis. “They’d rather be doing it all hands on. That’s part of being an engineer. Get in there and figure it out.”
Hong said that he joined the project because Pallis gave him an unbeatable pitch. Who could say no to doing a big NASA experiment on two eclipses crossing the USA in as many years?
“The experience I’ve had has been honestly so incredible. It’s a unique experience that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else,” said Hong. “It’s an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
Hong has been organizing and troubleshooting across a whole slew of university teams, on top of being a triple major in math, physics and computer science. When asked if he had time to sleep Hong said “sometimes” with a smile.
Hong said one of the biggest challenges was making sure they had functional instruments within their 12 pound weight limit. The Federal Aviation Administration mandates that weather balloons like these carry a maximum of 12 pounds of weight.
Vamsi Sripada was on Pallis’s team last year as part of a master’s degree in robotics engineering. He was hired on to help the Extreme Environments Lab with its grants and was enthusiastic to get back to the NASA balloon project.
“It’s a dream come true to me. All my life I wanted to work on a project related to space,” said Sripada. “The fun part is making wrong decisions and doing it again. Messing something up to learn to build something the right way.”
Not everyone on the team is an engineering student. Daria Howard, a master’s student in education, said that she joined the balloon team because she was enthusiastic about teaching students about science. “And it’s a learning experience for myself as well,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot from all these smart, intelligent people.”
Education is a central pillar of the balloon team’s mission with NASA. In the corner of the Extreme Environment’s lab, the team maintains High-Altitude Monkey, HAM, an educational robotic monkey. Ham was built in his own weather balloon payload, complete with instrumentation and a livestream setup. When he flies he can video call classrooms. A panel of inputs lets the robot answer questions from kids.
“Hello everyone watching me now. I feel like a big deal!” said HAM when prompted by Sripada. HAM needs some updates and won’t be launching in April.
While HAM might not be ready, the team is the only university crew providing Spanish-language, engineering educational content for NASA’s balloon launch. Juan Urrea, an engineering junior from Cali Colombia, has been asked to deliver a short educational talk in Spanish to students at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
“Since I was at the annular eclipse and now I’m on the total eclipse, I can talk about the differences, and also the experiences I had on the last eclipse,” said Urrea. The Moon has an elliptical orbit around Earth, which can make for differences in shadow and corona, scientists say.
Urrea said that during last year’s launch the feeling of being in the path of the annular eclipse was eerie and cool. Just before the sun was blocked, the air was warm and quiet. But as the sun disappeared, nocturnal animals emerged. Crickets chirped. Birds sang. The air felt different.
The 2023 annular eclipse was an appetizer for the total eclipse this April. Everybody is raring to go.
“They don’t maybe realize that they’ve made friends for a lifetime on this project,” said Pallis.