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Our camera reached the edge of space
News page on the website of Kestrel Bay International School
Last Friday, a small white box carried by a large balloon left our school playing field and climbed almost 32 kilometres into the sky. The students followed its journey live on a laptop as it rose. Inside the box were a camera, a GPS tracker and a temperature sensor, all chosen and tested by eight students from the Year 10 science club.
The project began last September, when club leader Ms Okafor challenged the students to photograph the curve of the Earth. 'At first we thought she was joking,' admits fifteen-year-old Tomás Reyes. 'Then she showed us that schools in other countries had done it with a budget smaller than the price of a new phone.'
The students spent three months planning. The hardest part, they say, was keeping the box light enough. The rules for this kind of flight say the box must weigh less than one kilogram, so every gram mattered. The team built it from polystyrene, which is light and also keeps the electronics warm. 'At the highest point, the temperature outside the box fell to minus fifty-four degrees,' explains Aiko Tanaka, who programmed the sensor. 'Without protection, the batteries would have stopped working within minutes.'
Before the launch, the club also needed permission from the national aviation authority, because the balloon would cross routes used by aircraft. They sent a flight plan two weeks in advance and were given a time slot of just one hour on the morning of the launch. After that, all they could do was hope for good weather.
The flight lasted two hours and forty minutes. As the balloon rose, the air around it became thinner and the balloon slowly grew until it was about the size of a small car. Finally, it burst, and the box fell back to Earth under a bright orange parachute. It landed in a field of sunflowers 86 kilometres away, where a farmer kindly helped the students find it.
The photographs were worth all the effort. The best one shows the thin blue line of the atmosphere against the black sky, with the coastline clearly visible below. It now hangs in the school entrance.
Ms Okafor believes the project taught the students far more than physics. 'They had to write budgets, contact officials and solve problems when things went wrong,' she says. 'Those are skills they will use in any career.' The club is already planning its next flight, which will carry seeds to find out how they react to the conditions high above the Earth.