'To infinity and UNB-eyond': students launch weather balloon to the edge of space

FREDERICTON -

With a shared love of engineering and aerospace, three UNB students put their heads together to reach impressive heights in their aerospace research.

"In the COVID year, we were compromising a lot in our studies and we were missing the hands on aspect learning engineering, which is a very hands on subject to learn, so I was feeling like I should make that up,” says engineering student Jagriti Luitel.

So Luitel and two engineering classmates, Ryan Whitney and John Estafanos, came up with the idea of creating a weather balloon and launching it to the edge of space and back.

"We were all in air cadets and we were all interested in aerospace, even though I'm an electrical engineer my interests do kind of vary all over the place,” said Whitney.

The three students formed a team called StratoFredericton and sorted out the science, legality and funding of the ‘out-of-this-world’ project.

Their first launch was a bust, literally, as the balloon burst.

The team's second launch exceeded expectations, and with three GoPros attached, they got to see their hard work pay off from three different angles.

"To the edge of space, so that is around 100,000 feet and our project got to a height of 103,000 feet and we had several purposes to the actual project which was taking pictures and video of the edge of space and getting data from the stratosphere,” Luitel said.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though. The GPS device they attached that said it worked up to 60,000 feet stopped working at ten.

Locating the device took some luck.

"We were very stressed out we drove out to where we expected the balloon to be, we waited a couple hours, nothing, we thought we failed again, we were kind of sad but then some kayakers called us and they found our payload on the lake,” Whitney said.

Along with the experiment they also wanted to share an important global message and encourage young people, especially girls' interest in STEM.

"By adding a climate message from a local climate organization called NBEN which stands for New Brunswick Environmental Network, and we wanted a picture of that poster in front of in front of the curvature of the earth to inspire youth to care more about the climate,” Luitel said.

“I, personally, being a female just wanted to encourage other girls to take initiative and leadership on projects like this,” she said.

UNB students sending their extracurricular project into the stratosphere, and inspiring us all to go above and beyond our limits.