During the 2021 Total Solar Ecplise, four years of undergraduate research came to fruition. The Austin Peay State University’s (APSU) High Altitude Balloon Research Team hosted several Teams at the APSU Farm to launch balloons to observe the scientific effects of a Solar Ecplise. Over the four years I spent on and off working on this project, I learned an incredible amount about balloons, electronics, software, science, etc. In this post, I am documenting a few of the projects or steps that lead us to my final launch as a student.

A good summary of such a balloon launch is this video.

Austin Peay’s location made it the prime location for observing the Total Solar Eclipse. People traveled from all across the world to see the Eclipse from the Austin Peay Campus.

Over the four years, I could present progress on the balloon team’s research. We presented the work at Posters On The Hill, a Tennessee State Legislator event at the TN State Capitol to share Academic Research with lawmakers and the public. I presented a specific payload on Remote Sensing from a balloon. This payload flew during the Eclipse and could highlight imagery in specific wavelengths looking at the earth before, during, and after the Eclipse.

During the final months, and as a senior research project, I worked on the way to passively stabilize the payload during flight. Unfortunately, we observed excessive turbulence and rotation during our test flights. The instability caused several experiments to provide subpar results. The poster describes the lightweight construction of the payload with multiple approaches to stabilize the payload passively.