High-Flying Balloons Give Students Unique Views of Solar Eclipses

Narration: Angela Vazzana

Transcript:

VO: Teams of students from across the United States have a unique vantage point of total solar eclipses thanks to scientific balloons.

Angela Des Jardins: “The Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project is a NASA mission-like adventure, collecting data from balloons that go high up into the atmosphere.”

VO: Started in 2014, the project engages college students and high schoolers in one of two distinct paths.

Angela Des Jardins: “One is the engineering track that has mostly engineering students that get to tinker on different payloads, the other track is an atmospheric science track where they’ll actually be launching weather sensors to study the impact of the eclipse.”

VO: Atmospheric science teams launch helium-filled weather balloons — the same as those used by the National Weather Service — every hour for hours before and after an eclipse.

Engineering teams fly larger balloons laden with cameras and experiments they build themselves, 100,000 feet up into the stratosphere. From there, they study a variety of things such as incoming cosmic radiation and ozone levels, as well as offering dramatic views of the Moon’s shadow on our planet.

Angela Des Jardins: “The project is really a unique one as it’s both an education but also doing amazing science that’s both about the eclipse itself and also the atmospheric response of the eclipse.”

VO: Student balloon teams made a historic first during the 2019 eclipse: they measured eclipse-driven atmospheric gravity waves in Earth’s stratosphere, or large ripples in the air caused by the temporary cooling due to the drop in sunlight.

Angela Des Jardins: “What excites me the most about this project is thinking about the experiences the students will have that they’ll remember forever.”