One moment, the young members of St. John’s-Ravenscourt School’s High Altitude Balloon Club were releasing their student-designed balloon in MacGregor.
The next — after losing the signal for the balloon and then suddenly recovering it again — they were abandoning their bus on a muddy road in the countryside, rushing to retrieve it.
The students weren’t the only ones who made an impressive journey.
While they were pursuing the balloon, it soared to the stratosphere, reaching an altitude of 100,000 feet and capturing images of the Earth below.
For the students, the lesson, with all its twists and turns, was as riveting as it was educational.
Through it, the Pembina Valley also received some spirited visitors.
The adventure begins
Abby Tobac is a grade seven student at St. John’s-Ravenscourt School. She’s also a part of the team of students who designed the balloon that ended up affording the group a zoomed-out glimpse of the planet.
Tobac says that the club began as a group for grade 7 and 8 students, and throughout the process, enthusiasm and buy-in mounted.
“As we got closer to the launch date, we started meeting more, and so we had a payload team and an electronics team,” she says. “I was on the payload team, and we were in charge of making the box ... that the balloon carried up into the outer atmospheres.”
According to Tobac, the teams began their work separately before they came together to ensure that the cameras and other equipment in the balloon would not weigh it down.
The next ingredient for the project was a vehicle full of helium.
The day of the launch
Tobac says that when the much-anticipated launch day arrived, the group of students hopped onto a bus in Winnipeg and went to a schoolyard in MacGregor, which was the launch site that the group calculated would carry the balloon near Rosenfeld.
“Then we all got all set up and had this huge balloon,” she says. “We had so much helium that a staff member had to drive in a separate truck with the helium tank.”
After filling up the balloon “super carefully,” Tobac says the group then affixed the payload to its creation.
“It was super nerve-wracking because then we just launched it, and then the balloon started going up and up into the sky,” she says.
Tracking the balloon
After the balloon was well on its way, the students began to monitor its progress and returned to the bus to start their pursuit of recovering their hard work.
At this point, as the students headed to Roland for a pit stop to wait for the balloon, they noticed that the balloon was drifting off course.
“Southern Manitoba is a great place to visit. It’s got its charms, so it's a nice place to drive through."
-Teacher Kaitlynn Buffie on travelling through the Pembina Valley in search of her student's high-altitude balloon.
They also lost contact with it.
Meeting a Roland resident
While the students were regrouping, they stopped for ice cream, where Carrie Hennan, a resident of Roland, came across them.
“I just walked out of the RM of Roland office, and I see this Beaver bus line sitting on Main Street in Roland, and I'm thinking like, ‘What the heck is it doing in Roland?’" she says.
Hennan says that because she’s the “kind of person who likes to know” what’s going on, she approached the group to see what they were up to.
“They told me that they were from St. John's-Ravenscourt School, and they had something in the air — a balloon with a cardboard box on it, a bunch of cameras and different types of devices that they were tracking,” she says.
The Roland resident's conversation with the students took place at a pivotal moment. While she was speaking with them, they discovered that the payload had landed, though it was not where they initially anticipated.
Instead of making it to Rosenfeld, it landed north of Sperling.
“They were quite excited,” she says.
A miraculous recovery
Of course, the students set off, but as they followed the signal, the terrain became impassable for their vehicle.
“We started driving, but we realized that we were on a gravel road, and at the end of this road that we had to drive on was mud,” says Tobac. “We had this big, long bus, and we couldn't turn on it.”
Tobac says that the students, determined to recover their balloon, began walking along the road in search of it. The journey ended up being three kilometres.
“In the payload itself we had some cameras on the sides of the payload sticking out so we could take pictures and videos, and then we had all of the wires and it had to plug into power banks so that they would stay charged [in the cold of the stratosphere].”
-Student Abby Tobac on the high-altitude balloon project.
“Lots of students ... started running because we were super excited. We wanted to find this payload, so we were looking for bright orange, which was the colour of our parachute, we were looking for a white, which was a balloon, and then even purple, because that was what colour our payload was,” says Tobac.
“We eventually found it right beside a farmer’s field.”
Tobac says that the distance to the balloon felt short, but walking back was much longer because everyone was tired from the gripping occurrence.
Even so, it was memorable.
“It was a super exciting day,” she says.
For all their effort, the students received the reward of the videos and photos that the balloon provided to them after its recovery — images of the deep blue and rich white of Earth.
An elaborate lesson
At every stage, the balloon launch required a great deal of preparation.
The group’s supervising teacher, Kaitlynn Buffie, says that in order for the balloon project to take flight, the group had to examine weather patterns and adjust plans based on their shifts, apply physics to determine the balloon's course, and contact Nav Canada to obtain clearance for launch.
As for the balloon, Buffie says that it reached 30 kilometres or 100,000 feet, which is three times as high as a commercial jet.
Related stories:
- Inspiring the next generation of pilots at Morden Flying Club’s Young Aviators
- A 'bittersweet' moment as grad approaches for W.C. Miller Valedictorian
“In the payload itself, we had some cameras ... sticking out so we could take pictures and videos, and then we had all of the wires, and it had to plug into power banks so that they would stay charged [in the cold of the stratosphere],” says Tobac.
“We had to put hand warmers in there, and we also had a spot tracker, so that when the balloon landed, we would be able to track it.”
The balloon was also equipped with a beacon that transmitted packets of information via a local radio network to track its altitude.
“We also had our student team build measurement devices using an Arduino,” says Buffie. “They had to do some coding there and [they were measuring] temperature and pressure versus time just to see how that changed as we went up in altitude.”
Tobac says she learned “so many things” throughout the process.
It was an enjoyable process for Buffie, too, who has done a project like this before, but perhaps not with results as edge-of-the-seat as this time around.
“It's just wonderful seeing the kids be engaged in this type of activity because it's so outside of what they're normally used to doing,” she says, adding that she also enjoyed the excitement.
“One of the coolest parts was ... losing the payload for a time,” she says. “It was just this perfect day, and it was really thrilling.”
The ‘perfect’ landing spot
Despite the mud and hike to the balloon, Buffie considers the balloon's landing spot “perfect.” She says that with projects of this nature, there is always the chance that the balloon could land in traffic, water, or another difficult-to-retrieve-from area.
The border was also a concern.
“We didn’t want to land over the border because that would be tricky, so we were aiming to land in Southern Manitoba. There are not a lot of big bodies of water, and there's a lot of flat land, so we're away from controlled airspace and other obstacles,” she says, noting that it is also just pleasant to be in the area.
“Southern Manitoba is a great place to visit. It’s got its charms, so it's a nice place to drive through as well,” she says.
For Tobac, who hadn’t had the opportunity to explore Southern Manitoba before the balloon project, the excursion was one unlike any she had experienced.
“Some of these town names I hadn't even heard of. I didn't know that there was a Roland in Manitoba, so it was very exciting, not just from a science standpoint, but also just to learn more about Manitoba, and learn that there’s lots of flat land by farmers’ fields and rural areas.”
Tobac says another highlight of the day was the pit stop in the Pembina Valley.
“Roland’s convenience store [has] delicious ice cream,” she says.
With files from Robyn Wiebe