Poster Presentation

High-Altitude Ballooning at Mercer; The Past, Present and Future.

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Abstract

Mercer University's Machine Intelligence and Robotics Lab founded the High Altitude Research Platform (HARP) in 2014, beginning our high-altitude ballooning team. We joined the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP) in Spring of 2023. As our experience as well as our team has grown, we have identified several directions we have begun to pursue. We are currently using the Iridium GPS system to track and communicate with our balloon, and we are moving to the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) to reduce our dependence on proprietary software. We also intend to perform proper launches at least twice a semester and refine other components such as the Suntracker, vent, cutdown, and balloon scout drone. The Suntracker is a payload that will constantly keep its camera pointed at the sun, which uses a gyroscope to counteract the rotation of the payload and keep the camera directed at the sun. The balloon scout drone will be a quadcopter that will receive signals from the balloon and track it once it lands to maintain a point of communication with the balloon if line-of-sight is lost. Over the past year, we had a total of 16 students working on NEBP, and 4 of those students have branched off to develop their research associated with high-altitude ballooning. With this in mind, we are restarting our high school STEM outreach program that will allow interested students to get hands-on research and engineering experience by building payloads to launch on our balloon.

Keywords: NEBP, APRS, STEM

How to Cite:

Patel, K. & Bland, R., (2024) “High-Altitude Ballooning at Mercer; The Past, Present and Future. ”, Academic High Altitude Conference 2024(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/ahac.18007