All Systems Are GO for Balloon Launch at Cape Callanan
Callanan students about to launch their weather balloon, a project done in conjunction with ISU’s Science Bound program.
While schools across the country are counting down the dwindling days until summer vacation a countdown of a different sort reached zero Wednesday morning at Callanan Middle School.
Cougar II let’s call it, a weather balloon bound for the upper reaches of the stratosphere, lifted off from the school’s campus right on schedule at 9:00 AM leaving behind the Mission Control team of science teacher Anson Bonte and his corps of student technicians. Bonte’s fellow science teacher Gerald Joseph and 8th graders Nadine Veasley, Anitra Simmons, Jayden Walker, Nasir Muhammad, Mahmoud Ali, Sandra Orellana, Alex Ramirez and Dayvion Thompson fueled the bubbly craft with helium and then held it down while the assembled student body counted down the last 15 seconds before the balloon was released and away it went into the cloudless blue sky where it appeared for a couple of moments to be a second moon sailing towards the usual one that was fading in the early morning light.
Up, Up and Away, an oldie hit by the 5th Dimension about a beautiful balloon, would have made a perfect soundtrack for the launch of the project that Callanan’s Science Bound cohort has been prepping for all year. Science Bound is a partnership between Iowa State University and DMPS designed to encourage ethnically diverse students to pursue ASTEM (agricultural, scientific, technical, engineering and mathematics) careers.
Last year’s maiden voyage was plagued by bad weather that postponed the blastoff twice. By the time it finally happened school had dismissed for the summer and there was no crowd of onlookers. But this time was different. Everyone clapped and cheered as the latex orb, about six feet in diameter, climbed and shrunk. Within a couple of minutes it receded from the appearance of another full moon to that of a bright, distant daystar. Actually, according to Bonte, the balloon would be expanding in size to 36 feet in diameter by the time it achieved its maximum altitude of 90,000 feet. Then it would pop like overblown bubblegum and descend slowly thanks to a small parachute in the school colors of orange and blue.
The crew planned to hop in a van Wednesday afternoon and retrieve the data box which included a camera and tracking devices in addition to lots of atmospheric readings. A year ago they had to range almost ninety miles to fetch the first one in a field near the town of Sigourney.
Callanan opened in 1927 and has been a launching pad to high school and beyond ever since. But sending a giant balloon aloft really drives home the point. While the student crew was hanging on and keeping the thing earthbound it appeared above their heads like a thought bubble in a comic strip, one filling with dreams of college scholarships and astronomical futures and, more immediately, the fun summer that’s looming just ahead. But they could only hold it down so long before they had to let it go to rise as high as possible. Their own times will come. Several years from now, after high school and college have pumped them full of educational helium they’ll be released, too. And tracked. And they’ll have lots to report on everything they see and learn “way up in the air in a beautiful balloon…”
