Five Balloons, 19 Hours: Devil Dragon Balloon Team's Latest Launches

By Claire Lynch '27
SCH Student Lead, Devil-Dragon Balloon Team

This weekend, the Devil Dragon Balloon Team (SCH and Drexel University's joint high-altitude ballooning team) executed a coordinated launch as part of the High-altitude Engineering Research in Astrophysics collaboration (HERA). Six high school and college teams across the country launched balloons, timed to burst at their local solar noon on Saturday or Sunday. The experiment is designed to find out if the abundance of cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere is dependent on latitude, because the Earth’s magnetic field strength varies with latitude. The cosmic ray data were collected using a detector called the Cosmic Watch, developed by MIT and the University of Delaware. The SCH team is led by teachers and mentors Peter Randall and Alissa Sperling.

In addition to the Cosmic Watch, each team launched a METEOR, a flight computer designed, manufactured, and coded by SCH students Leo Cohen and Logan Landau, intended to record and report altitude, temperature, pressure, magnetic field strength, and location. The launches were partially intended to test METEOR. Creator Leo Cohen reports that they "made progress towards a successful product by discovering its flaws."

In addition to the coordinated launch at noon on Saturday, the Devil Dragon team launched three extra balloons at various times other times to study how time impacts cosmic ray measurements. In total, the team launched five balloons over just 19 hours. The team has recovered three of the five balloons; the two unrecovered balloons are currently in trees near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Fortunately, the team was able to recover the two most important balloons, those from the coordinated launch that other teams across the country launched.

To recover the data that the payloads on these balloons recorded, the team needs to bring them back to the lab. Every launch runs a certain amount of risk due to the abundance of tree coverage in our surrounding area; however, the team is determined to retrieve the balloons from even the most difficult landing spots, as we have in the past.