Weather Balloon Spring Flight

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 Weather Balloon Spring Flight

This semester my team flew an RF receiver, CO2/ humidity sensor, Geiger Counter, seeds, a peep, and the old sensors from last semester (temperature, accelerometer, and pressure sensor). The RF receiver was to measure the strength of the Radio Frequency. The CO2 and humidity sensor are self-explanatory. The Geiger Counter (radiation sensor), temperature, and pressure coincides with the seeds; the Garden Cress seeds grow within 2 weeks, so we wanted to see which of the three variables that could affect it (radiation, temperature, and pressure) would and how. The old sensors were pre calibrated and ready to go from last semester. I do not know much about the RF receiver's calibration since another team member worked on it. The Geiger counter required calibrating with the Geology department to borrow a radioactive sample rock. The CO2 and Humidity sensor required calibrating through a separate CO2 and Humidity sensor (the separate sensors were pre-calibrated but had bad operating temperature and humidity making it bad for flight). Upon flight we gathered the following.







Unfortunately the accelerometer broke due to a power cut. Furthermore, the Geiger Counter shut off upon flight, simply because one of the pins came off as soon as we closed the payload minutes before launch. Fortunately, we had other data. The pressure behaved as expected. It dropped with altitude. The two vertical lines represent the pop and landing of the balloon respectively. The temperature vs time behaved as expected too (a quick google search would show temperature decrease, increase, and decrease as you go up, so the data is reasonable). The yellow and red lines were are for the temperature sensors inside the payload, so they did not get as low. The battery behaved as expected too. It decreased as we used power. The sudden spike at the end was when the battery died. The RF receiver was reasonable as well. The first graph shows the electromagnetic field. The first vertical yellow line demonstrates where the skip happened. The skip refers to where the electromagnetic field levels are the strongest before shorting out. The 2nd RF graph is the strength of the RF levels given in voltages. The CO2 and humidity readings are good as well; they decrease with altitude. The reason huge gaps are present between data is because, although the CO2 and humidity sensor take data every 5 seconds, to extract the data from the EPROOM, the data had to be compressed due to the limitations of the pro micro we were using. Overall, flight was 80% successful.






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