(Ames) Classes have been canceled at Southern Illinois University this upcoming Monday. There is no holiday or university business prompting the Carbondale college to let students loose for the day, but rather an astronomical event — a total solar eclipse.
Viewers will convene in Saluki Stadium with special glasses allowing them to watch the moon completely block the sun while research teams gather data to learn about the eclipse and the impact it causes on temperature, the atmosphere and more.
Nine Iowa State University students will join them in order to send a high-altitude balloon ten of thousands of feet in the air, hoping to record the eclipse and send a unique view of it home to Ames, where people will be able to watch it in real time.
The members of the High-Altitude Balloon Experiments in Technology (HABET) course at ISU will launch their helium-filled high-altitude balloon around 45 minutes ahead of the eclipse’s totality, sending it as high as 80,000 feet in order to catch the four minutes and nine seconds of complete coverage.
The students are now in the final stages of preparation, with plans to conduct a tether test of the equipment ahead of Monday’s launch. Brody Echer, HABET team leader and a senior who is studying information management systems at ISU, said the excitement among the students ahead of the eclipse is “palpable.”
“The team will be able to experience what a total eclipse is and be able to kind of have our voices heard and our experiences shared with all the people that are going to be in Illinois that are also there for research,” Echer said.
While the team did travel to New Mexico in October to send a balloon up during an annular solar eclipse, or an eclipse where the moon covers most of the sun when passing between it and the Earth, this will be their first total solar eclipse. The New Mexico trip also allowed students to test the equipment that they’ll use on Monday.
Using a valve to make the balloon float at the desired altitude rather than letting it ascend until it bursts, assistant teaching professor of aerospace engineering Matthew Nelson said the balloon will be equipped with different cameras that will, hopefully, project a live video feed of the eclipse and record it at all angles for further study later on.
(Photo by Brooklyn Draisey/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
“If everything works, the idea is that we will do everything livestreamed, so it will be in real time,” Matthew Nelson said. “There are some challenges with that, with just the distance that we have to send that video signal over, but that’s the goal.”
Iowa Space Grant Consortium Director Sara Nelson said she and others will gather on campus to watch the livestream, cheering the team on from afar.
Once the eclipse is over and the team has gathered all it can, the equipment will separate from the balloon and come back down with a parachute and GPS tracking enabled so students can recover it.
Alongside the live feed and recordings, the balloon equipment will gather information on how temperature, humidity and other factors shift during the eclipse.
“It’s a unique opportunity where, normally, we would have our typical sun cycle that we’d have and then now all of a sudden we’re putting this giant shadow (up), so the temperature gradients, how that affects wildlife, how that affects even some of the other things in our atmosphere and stuff like that, that’s what we’re trying to study some more with these,” Matthew Nelson said.
Carbondale has actually seen a total eclipse fairly recently, he said, having experienced the solar eclipse in 2017 as well. After Monday, the next eclipse like this won’t be seen in the U.S. for another 20 years.
This will also be a good opportunity for networking, Matthew Nelson said, and data gathered from the launch will be shared online and with Montana State University, who ISU is collaborating with for this project through the National Eclipse Ballooning Project.
While this is a rare opportunity for the students in HABET, the professor said the continuous course allows students to participate in a variety of projects that can include rovers, rockets and more. Once they debrief after Monday’s launch and finish going through the data, the students will move onto planning their next launches.
“We’ve already got a flight scheduled with the University of Iowa over the summer, and the students will have lots more going on as we go into the next school year and stuff like that,” he said.
