As part of teacher Stephen Lys’ Science 10 curriculum, the students at Peacock Collegiate put together a weather balloon and launch it into the sky.

This year’s launch took place last week and registered some interesting data.

The balloon was armed with a Lego astronaut, computers, a GPS and cameras to measure data such as wind speeds, altitude and temperature.

The launch took place at Peacock and, after two hours and 40 minutes, the balloon landed seven kilometres south of Grenfell, or 191 kilometres from the launch site.

“Last year it landed just outside of town near the Weyburn turnoff. It only went about 16 kilometres along the ground, but other times we’re had it go north of Yorkton,” Lys said. “One time it went over Estevan and landed down in the States.”

To get the whole school involved, Lys said all of the students could track the balloon from their cell phones and they had a competition to see who could correctly guess the latitude and longitude of where the balloon would land.

This year’s balloon also reached a maximum altitude of 94,000 feet.

“Our goal is always to break 100,000 (feet) but we’ve done eight launches and we’ve only broken 100 once. It usually peters out in the mid-90s somewhere just shy of 100,000,” Lys said.

Here are some other data collected by the balloon:

  • Min Temp: -55 °C
  • Max Velocity: 138 km/h
  • Atmospheric Pressure: 93.7% at launch, 1.2% at summit
  • Flight time: 2:40

Peacock Collegiate captured the journey on the Youtube video below.