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High school near-space team shows 76,000-foot balloon flight, outlines reliability fixes
Summary
Landry Howard, team lead for the school’s Near Space Research Team, described two seasonal balloon flights, a payload that reached roughly 76,000 feet, SD-card failures that forced hardware simplification, and plans to prioritize reliability over complexity next year.
Landry Howard, team lead for the Cascan Union High School Near Space Research Team, presented the club’s NASA Ascend-supported high-altitude balloon project to the board, describing hardware, software and flight results.
Howard said the team built a payload using Arduino hardware and a set of sensors — a BME280 pressure sensor, temperature sensors, a UV sensor and a GPS module — and collected telemetry and 4K video during flights. “Our mission is to…design, build and fly a high-altitude balloon into 100,000 feet,” Howard said, noting that the team’s most recent flight reached about 76,000 feet and then burst.
The presentation covered technical details and troubleshooting. The team originally planned a more complex architecture using an Arduino Mega and multiple sensors but experienced SD-card failures and space constraints inside an ABS enclosure; they described simplifying to an Arduino Uno with a directly-connected SD-card reader and a reduced set of sensors to improve reliability. Howard described the data cadence (“all of our sensors read for about 10 seconds” and then write to the data file) and said the group uses MATLAB for telemetry analysis.
Board members asked how many flights the program completed this year; Howard said the team performed two flights, one each semester. When asked why the district’s school is the only Arizona high school in the Ascend program, Howard credited a mentor’s connections: “Our mentor is John Morris,” a board member observed, and the superintendent thanked Morris for his leadership.
The presentation emphasized student learning outcomes and recruitment: the team is pursuing ham radio licensing, electrical design skills and a focus on teaching future students. Howard said the group will prioritize reliability over complexity in the coming season and continue to use telemetry and video to evaluate flights.
The board did not take formal action on the presentation; members thanked the students and the district posted the team’s poster and a video link on the board docs site.
