The University of Minnesota Twin Cities Stratospheric Ballooning Team has returned from Indiana where they were flying balloon-borne experiments during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024.
The UMN Ballooning Team was part of the “video-streaming” side (also known as the “engineering” side) of the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP). More than 700 students from 75 educational institutions across the United States participated in the NEBP, with about half on the video-streaming side.
Experiments, besides video-streaming and other cameras, included studies of gravity waves, planetary boundary layer changes, and weather patterns; making general atmospheric environmental measurements such as temperature, pressure, relative humidity, light intensity, and cosmic radiation; and testing space technology proofs-of-concept.
