Students to launch weather balloon today in Polk Place

While letting go of a balloon is a tragedy by any child’s standards, UNC students will be releasing one on purpose today — all in the name of science.

Members of UNC’s chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space will launch their first ever weather balloon in front of Wilson Library during the 11:50 a.m. class change so students passing through the quad can watch.

A camera will be attached to the weather balloon to record its flight, said sophomore Patrick Gray, president and founder of the chapter.

“That’s the main thing of what we want — a view of campus getting smaller and smaller, and then of it crashing back down.”

“We hope to get pictures of the curvature of Earth,” said sophomore Dan Plattenberger, a member of the group.

Gray said there will also be a live GPS feed tracking the balloon on the group’s Facebook page.

The balloon will reach an altitude of about 90,000 feet before bursting, and Gray predicts it will land somewhere in Eastern North Carolina.

“There’s a small chance the winds might be too high to launch it, but we’ll probably do it anyway,” Gray said.

“We might just have to launch it from a high location if the winds are too high.”

Plattenberger said the idea for a weather balloon launch came from YouTube.

“One of our members saw a YouTube clip of it, and the word kind of just spread, and everyone got excited about it,” Plattenberger said.

This project is funded entirely by a $200 grant from the North Carolina Space Grant organization. The physics department will provide the helium.

“It’s about 1,000 birthday balloons worth of helium,” Gray said.

Physics professor Gerald Cecil, a member of the North Carolina Space Grant organization and a supporter of the student group, said the success of the weather balloon project depends on if organizers can actually find the balloon once it pops and subsequently lands.

“It has a GPS that will tell them where it is but it’s not completely accurate. So they’ll have to search a little,” he said. “My theory is it’ll end up hanging in a tree a hundred feet off the ground or fall in somebody’s lake. Hopefully, it will do neither of these, and it’ll land gently in a park somewhere.”

Despite the slim chance of recovery, members said they are excited about the launch and the publicity that will come from it.

“We should have a successful launch,” Plattenberger said. “Maybe not a successful recovery, but a successful launch.”

Regardless, Plattenberger said the weather balloon launch will give students an opportunity to see what the group is all about — through a hands-on interaction with space.

“One hundred thousand feet is classified as the edge of space,” Gray said. “On a budget of less than $1,000, this is the closest you can get to space.”

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