Scientist/Educator Retired Deadwood, South Dakota, United States
Abstract: The South Dakota / Wyoming Eclipse Ballooning Team is a collaboration between South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDM) and four area high schools (Lakota Tech in Pine Ridge, SD (LTHS), Lower Brule in Lower Brule, SD (LBHS) Newcastle in Newcastle, WY (NHS) and Spearfish in Spearfish, SD (SHS)). Part of the team (SDM and three of the high schools) were funded through the Nationwide Eclipse Balloon Project (NEBP), a NASA project managed through Montana State University. The goal of the national project was for each team to launch scientific balloons during the annular solar eclipse of Oct 14, 2023 and the total solar eclipse of Apr 8, 2024 - taking atmospheric data and streaming video to media sites. After the initial funding was obtained and the team established, teachers and students from Lower Brule High School and a teacher from a local middle school joined the effort with additional funding from the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium, also a NASA-funded organization. In addition to the payloads provided by the NEBP, our team launched a second balloon with experiments designed by high school students. Because the participating high schools are located from 45 min to 2 hours away from the university campus in Rapid City, SD, high school students were integrated into the project through two four-day summer workshops in 2023. In these, the students and teachers learned about the project, ballooning basics, and eclipses. They designed and built payload boxes, each school taking responsibility for one or more of the NASA project instruments, cameras and/or tracking device. Each workshop concluded with one practice launch. Other practice launches were conducted on Saturdays during the summer and fall leading up to the annular eclipse. We will report on the challenges and successes of the April launch during the total solar eclipse, including a preliminary look at the atmospheric data and video of the eclipse’s shadow and a discussion of the team dynamics.
