Wednesday, June 10, 2015 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
21
The Nugget Newspaper Crossword
By Jacqueline E. Mathews, Tribune News Service
photo by ceili cornelius
Steven Peterzen worked with students on their project to launch a weather
balloon over Sisters Country.
Sisters students launch
weather balloon
By Jim Cornelius
News Editor
to “recognize the nature of sci-
ence and design,” as Givot put
it. Sometimes things fail and
you have to go back and tweak
the design — sometimes more
than once.
The overall mission was a
success. Students were able to
use GPS to locate the balloon’s
landing site off Century Drive
in the Mt. Bachelor area, and
they hiked out to retrieve it.
Givot hopes to repeat the
project next year, citing the
educational benefits not only
of the fundamental scientific
processes involved, but also
the hands-on team-building
that went into the project.
“I will do it again in a sec-
ond if it works out,” she said.
The science process classes
at Sisters High School capped
their spring trimester studies
with the launch of a weather
balloon on Friday, June 5.
The students assembled
a payload of experiments
designed by multiple sepa-
rate teams, advised by sci-
ence teacher Rima Givot, stu-
dent teacher Heidi Gillespie
and balloon expert Steven
Peterzen. As president of
ISTAR Group, Peterzen has
international experience in
sending up balloons, some-
times with massive payloads.
(See www.theistargroup.com.)
Accordign to Givot,
student experiments
included weather
monitoring and trajec-
tory tracking; a test of
atmospheric pressure
change on algae pho-
tosynthesis; effects of
intense high-altitude
light on inks; a test of
earthworm survival
at altitude; and an
investigation of cel-
lular change in flower
petals.
Givot said that there
was an immediately
obvious result to the
last experiment.
“There definitely
was a change in the
cells,” she said.
Not all the experi-
ments panned out.
The weather monitor-
ing equipment either
failed or was not set up
correctly; it returned
no data. And the bal-
loon — a 600-gram
latex unit with a burst
altitude of 100,000
feet — did not fly as
high as anticipated. It
topped out somewhere
around 85,000 feet
before bursting, due to
a heavier payload.
That’s all part of
photo by ceili cornelius
the deal though, and
a valuable part of the up, up and away! the Sisters weather
educational experi- balloon soared to over 80,000 feet and
ence, allowing students landed near Century drive outside Bend.
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