Natick HS High Altitude Balloon Group Project a Success
Charlie Bures, WA3ITR writes:
On Wednesday, June 20, the Natick HS High-Altitude-Balloon Group launched their platform at 4:07pm from the Hatfield Elementary School, near Northampton in the middle of Massachusetts. The APRS tracking device used Charlie’s callsign (WA3ITR) with a dash-7.
From the APRS track shown below, the HAB was up to 45,000 feet over Worcester traveling east at over 85 pmh! It circled over South Natick & Framingham, reaching up to 91,953 feet before it burst. It continued toward the Atlantic as it parachuted back to the ground. Although the plan from the simulations was to land in the Natick area, that wasn’t going to happen as it sped to the east.
The chase team couldn’t go that fast ! The last APRS point was in East Weymouth at about 500 feet above the ground (AGL) at 6:38pm . The Natick group hoped to find it, since the 3 GoPro cameras were only recording photos to their internal micro-disks. Luckily, they spotted it around 7:10pm in a farmer’s field in Hingham and he gave them permission to recover it. Now, we will be checking the 3 cameras to see if there are any photos and, if so, making a short video or photo album.
