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 Irvington, NY - A group of Irvington students will be launching a weather balloon this spring. These students are members of New York Near Space Research (NYNSR), a self-named sub-group of the science club, who have banded together to work on a high-altitude balloon project, funded through an Irvington Education Foundation grant.
They are being assisted, particularly in the area of communications hardware/software, by the Westchester Emergency Communications Association (WECA), an amateur radio club (www.weca.org). The project is the brainchild of Javier Anderson, 11th grade, who got the idea after watching a NASA project of the same kind on television. Javier is a member of WECA.
Anderson approached Nathan Struth, also a junior, president of the science club, and the idea took flight. That was 18 months ago.
With the help of physics/chemistry teacher Joseph Kleinmann, who is club adviser, Javier wrote a grant proposal for the funding needed to purchase equipment. The IEF responded with $5,385 to purchase the supplies. This included the 8-foot-diameter balloon, the helium to fill it, and other components. The different parts of the project have been broken down into “blocks” of related functions: propulsion, recovery, communications, packaging and design, data acquisition, and power supply.
Club members include Christian Picon (10th grade), George Parsons (11th), Sagar Setru (11th), Neil Ganti (10th), Minesh Patel (11th), Vincent Ciraco (11th), Yu Arima (11th), Alex Nedo (9th), Charlie Coddington (11th) and Tommy Hammond (12th).
Dwight Smith and Bob Wilson of WECA assist the students on a regular basis regarding the project’s communications block that includes radio signals, video transmissions and the GPS system.
“We are happy to help and promote this interest in radio and research,” said Mr. Smith, who is the repeater operations director at WECA. “They [NYNSR] are the steering committee; we are just showing them how to integrate the parts.”
Jack Mangione, an Irvington High School parent, of Pico Electronics (Pelham, N.Y.) has trained students in soldering techniques. Pico also donated a soldering station and related supplies to the project.
The balloon will be launched in the spring and will verify basic capability in the initial flight and, hopefully, provide scientific data on a number of subjects. The balloon is designed to travel some 25 miles into the atmosphere to enter Near Space and return, sending streaming video, GPS data, information on magnetic field densities, temperature, relative humidity, density of the atmosphere, shear velocity of adjacent vertical air currents and other phenomenon in which the students become interested.
For more information , go to www.NYNSR.org.
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