Portland State Magazine Fall 2017

>> THE BALLOON launches were the culmination of months of work by the students, during which they made equipment housings with 3D printers, fine-tuned the remote tracking technologies required to transmit data, calculated the balloons’ likely trajectories, and tackled hundreds of other details essential for success. The work also included practice launches at the rural home of engineering professor Mark Weislogel. After the big event came the work of retrieving the cameras and data collection equipment. Each balloon was designed to pop when it reached a specific altitude, with parachutes carrying the high-tech payloads back to Earth. The PSU team recovered one of the payloads from a farmer’s field near Corvallis Municipal Airport. They found another 80 feet up in a tree in the Coast Range. And the next morning, the team was headed back to the Coast Range to recover two more. Not all of the balloons survived. One of them, perhaps due to a small leak, never gained full altitude, which caused it to drift out over the Pacific, never to be seen again. But small glitches are part of the learning process and were more than made up for by the stunning images collected from the remaining balloons. You can see the video feeds from different teams at the Eclipse Ballooning Project at eclipse.stream.live .  John Kirkland is a staff member in the PSU Office of University Communications. 14 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE FALL 2017 The balloons each supported three cameras that took photos of the changing landscape and celestial bodies at 96-frame bursts every 30 seconds. As the balloons popped, their elegant, high-altitude deflation was also caught on camera. Lower left photo by Isabel Rodriguez.