After an experiment gone awry, a teacher and group of students from Indiana are hoping to get back a weather balloon they launched that they believe could be in the Chatham-Kent area.
Elizabeth King, a teacher from Concord Ox Bow Elementary School in Elkhart, In., was in charge of the Grade 4 project where students worked together to build a weather balloon from scratch.
According to King, the project started in January 2019 and is a cumulation of hard work from all the students.
"We basically learn everything that we have to about how to launch a weather balloon, what the purpose is, what supplies we need, who we need to talk to to make sure it's legal, what kind of things can we expect from it, where do we think it will go," explained King.
The balloon was equipt with a GoPro so students could review the footage, as well as several different tracking devices to monitor the balloon's whereabouts, altitude and speed.
The group launched it into the sky on May 3 and based on weather patterns and conditions, predicted where it might end up. King said they correctly predicted the direction but underestimated the speed.
"The prediction we ran that day and a couple of days before had it ending up near Ann Arbour, Michigan," she said. "The balloon did in fact go those same directions but it just kept going a lot further than we thought it would."
(Photo courtesy of Elizabeth King)
The balloon itself without the tracking devices weighed around three pounds and was five feet in diameter. As the balloon went higher in altitude, helium caused it to expand. According to King, it reached travelling speeds of up to 270 kilometres an hour at one point.
The balloon popped around 110,000 feet in the air over south central Michigan, 189 kilometres from its launching point, but the wind still carried it on its journey.
The object then crossed over the Canadian border and a few hours after launching, the tracking signal was eventually lost. King said the last piece of tracking data recorded was when the balloon was at around 2,000 feet in the air and near the eastern edge of Lake St. Clair.
"We're not sure if it kept going and it's in a marshy area, were not sure if it fell into the lake, we're not sure if it floated for a while and ended up washing up along the shore. At this point, we don't know," she said.
This is the third time King has conducted the experiment and the first time the balloon has gone missing. She said the children involved in the project are disappointed, but she makes sure to talk with them beforehand to prepare them for all possible outcomes.
"We talk about how really after we let the balloon go, we really have no control after that, anything could happen to it. We don't know how high it will go, how far it will go or where it will land," King said. "Of course, the goal is to get it back and see what happened to our experiment, see the footage from the GoPro, collect the data."
Had things gone as planned, the students would have taken a bus that day to where the balloon had landed and collected it.
If you do notice a large deflated balloon floating around town, you can contact King at eking@concord.k12.in.us.