A Success of “The Sending and Reclaiming of Upper Air Sounding Balloon” Experiment by Our Students
Click: Post Date:2016-05-30 08:11:06 Event Date:2016-05-30 08:11:06
On April 23rd 2016, five senior students from the International Class of our school, the High School Attached to NWNU successfully sent an upper air sounding balloon on the playground and reclaimed it on April 26th 2016 in the He Jiawan Village, Xia Guanying Town, Yu Zhong County of Lanzhou City. The five students are respectively Sun Changxu, Shi Duohao, Yin Haobo, He Yifan and Wang Qinghan. According to the statistics on the Internet, there are only a few successful experiments about the sending and reclaiming of upper air sounding balloons in China. Naturally, the success made by our students greatly kindles the students’ real enthusiasm for exploring cutting-edge discoveries and carrying out scientific experiments.
The upper air balloon, also called high-altitude scientific balloon, refers to a kind of unpowered aerostat flying in the stratosphere. Recent years have witnessed that the upper air balloon sounding has played a more and more important role in various fields like basic sciences, aviation and environment and it has been widely applied in different scientific researches with the development of technologies such as materials as well as measurement and control. This kind of experiment is commonly conducted to give the students scientific education in the foreign basic education area while it is quite rare at home.
Five students involved in the experiment: Sun Changxu, Shi Duohao, Yin Haobo, He Yifan and Wang Qinghan (from left to right)
Sun Changxu told that they discovered this experiment by chance when they went through some overseas scientific websites. They found it was quite interesting, believing it was with certain feasibility. So they decided to have a try. Generally speaking, the experiment with the utilization of upper air balloon consists of various procedures, such as making plans, assembly of pods, equipment debugging, site debugging, sending balloon, flying of balloon in the sky, landing after cutting and reclaiming on the floor. Under the support of our school and with the guidance of our physics teacher Deng Tianhua, they have made the preparation for nearly one year, including looking for references on the Internet, learning some relevant knowledge about physics and chemistry, purchasing equipment, assembly, repeated debugging and so on. Finally, the fourth month of the year 2016 witnessed the success of sending and reclaiming the balloon. The balloon has been equipped with motion cameras, GPS, buzzer, charger and parachute, which are used to shot, record and reclaim. After analyzing the statistics, it has been found that the balloon’s hovering height is about 20,000 meters, which is a little lower than it was expected. Nevertheless, the flight track has been detected and relevant data has been recorded. The balloon has been reclaimed successfully in accordance with the recorded data, which makes the team members much more excited.
Air inflation before sending
Sending successfully
Indicative picture for reclaiming
A success of reclaiming in Yuzhong County
Above: reclaiming site
Below: the red object refers to the balloon.
The five students benefited a lot from the experiment. When they applied for universities this year, they received good results from overseas well-known universities, such as Rice University and University of Southern California. They said that they have mentioned this experiment in their personal statements as well as during their interviews so that a good impression has been left on the interviewers. Now, although they have graduated, they hope that our school could pay more emphasis on carrying out students’ scientific experiments so that the students could have more opportunities to conduct scientific explorations.
