Oral Presentation Only

Developing a High Altitude Balloon program at Penn State Wilkes-Barre: Lessons Learned

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Abstract

Penn State Wilkes-Barre is a newcomer in the Academic High Altitude Balloon (HAB) activities with its first flight taking place in November 2010 and second flight scheduled for April 2011. Our HAB activities are focused on the Engineering and Electrical Engineering Technology programs taught at our campus. This paper is divided into four different parts. First, it describes the challenges associated with the development of the HAB. While the majority of conference attendees are very experienced in HAB, we cannot forget institutions that want to start their own HAB programs. Secondly we describe the challenges in involving our campus community beyond the faculty and students directly participating in the flight. In the third part, the paper describes the first balloon flight that took place in November 2010 making an emphasis on the problems that we encountered. Examples of these are a severely underinflated balloon with an ascent rate of 440 fpm that caused it to land far away from the predicted site, the problems we encountered due to the format of the GPS data, etc. Once again, the focus here is to share those with institutions starting their own HAB programs. The final area of this paper describes the current undergraduate research activities that take place under the HAB. We used the excitement developed by the students who participated in the first balloon flight to further their education through undergraduate research in electrical engineering technology areas.

How to Cite:

Lozano-Nieto, A., (2011) “Developing a High Altitude Balloon program at Penn State Wilkes-Barre: Lessons Learned”, Academic High Altitude Conference 2011(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/ahac.8139