The University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team’s project doesn’t seem that impressive at a glance. A tangled mess of wires and electronics bursting forth from a violently hatched Styrofoam shell, with a rickety stabilizing arm shooting through the centre and out from the sides like spindly limbs — it’s incredible to think that this contraption was carried nearly 30 kilometres into the sky just over a month ago.

The project is a High Altitude Balloon and it’s the second attempt that the USST has made at reaching that 30 km target. Launched on Aug. 2 from the U of S campus, the HAB was pulled upward by three cubic metres of hydrogen — chosen because of its lower density when compared to the Earth’s oxygen-rich environment — which steadily expanded the balloon as atmospheric changes in pressure occurred until it reached its breaking point.

Austin Shirley, who worked alongside the project’s four to five fluctuating members and was voted in last year as vice-president of engineering for the USST, explained the process of the balloon’s lift in detail.

“As it goes up it keeps expanding and, because there’s less pressure outside, as it keeps expanding it keeps giving more lift,” Shirley said. “Like how when you let go of a helium balloon and it just goes up forever, this’ll keep going up until it expands so much that it has to pop — it can’t stretch anymore — and that happens at about 30 km in the sky.”

Though the USST hoped to reach 30 km, the balloon burst shy of their goal at the relatively close altitude of over 27 km. The height marks an ascent well into the Earth’s stratosphere.

“The target was definitely 30 km and we didn’t reach it because there’s a bit of a balance between the amount of lift you get from the balloon as well as how fast you go up and how long you want the balloon to last,” Shirley said. “If it goes up slower there’s a better chance of it going higher because the balloon won’t pop as soon, but if you want to go up quickly then you have to put more gas in it and that means it’ll expand and pop faster higher in the atmosphere.”

Even though the team has yet to reach its goal, Shirley believes that with a bit of recalibration they’ll be successful.

“We have to find the right balance of weight and the amount of gas before we can actually get to 30, 35. I don’t know if higher than 35 is actually possible, but definitely 30 is possible. We got very close on this launch and on our previous launch last fall.”

Any concerns that the HAB could cause damage after its balloon support pops, perhaps by landing on someone or crashing into something of value, are easily accounted for.

Weighing in at a relatively spry three kilograms, the craft was supported during its descent by a parachute, which was not released at a certain point but was rather hauled alongside as a pre-deployed part of the overall mechanism.

Coupled with this apparatus, the craft also featured two separate global positioning system transmitters which were used to track it live as it made its voyage — one of which was donated by the Saskatoon Amatuer Radio Club and was included under mandatory conditions set by Transport Canada. The latter group helped oversee the procedure to prevent the HAB’s flight path from interfering with any air travel happening in the surrounding area. The flight path is also fairly simple to track, as the HAB “always follows the jetstream at that altitude, so it’ll almost always head East,” according to Shirley.

Despite the various failsafes in place intended to prevent issues from arising, the USST did run into some trouble near the end of a journey that saw it travelling a distance of 60 km across the prairies and eventually splashing into a pond outside of Zelma, Sask.

Though the HAB’s watery end point would seem to spell disaster, it in fact had little effect on the process.

“Because of the Styrofoam it floated and it floated nice and upright, so it was pretty easy to retrieve,” Shirley said, acknowledging that he wasn’t personally there for the recovery.

While its ability to float meant that any electronics onboard remained undamaged by the unexpected splash at flight’s end, the Styrofoam also proved to be a quite versatile material for enclosing the HAB’s payload — though the final product’s chewed appearance would suggest otherwise.

“Part of the plan is that it does get damaged. Most of it’s made out of fairly cheap materials,” Shirley said. The shell “is made out of Styrofoam and it’s a pretty good insulator. It’s homemade Styrofoam insulation, so as it becomes -60 degrees Celsius outside, it only goes to about -40 inside. If these electronics became -60 they would probably stop working, so it is really important to keep it properly enclosed. It’s so enclosed in fact that we have to tear it apart afterwards in order to collect our data.”

Other materials used included an ice cream bucket, which helped to protect an antenna for transmitting data.

In total, the project only cost an estimated $120 worth of materials, though some were supplied via sponsorships from groups like Solidworks, which donates licensing for their software to the USST, local engineering groups Space Engineering Division and WRT Equipment as well as the Saskatoon Engineering Students Society and the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan.

Though the balloon itself is the most striking part of the HAB project, the real science is happening just below. Encased in the Styrofoam frame are a series of devices that were used to both help stabilize the balloon as it drifts skyward while collecting additional informtaion, including an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope, as well as additional electronics that recorded further data.

Components such as the team’s 720p camera captured video for the duration of the trip. The resulting footage, which was several hours in length, has since been compiled into a two minute highlight reel available on the USST’s YouTube channel.

Some of the images that were singled out from the resulting video are nothing short of breathtaking.

“At that height you can really easily see the curvature of the Earth,” Shirley said. “You can also see the sky is completely black from space — you don’t see the blue sky anymore.”

Another piece of equipment onboard was a near-infrared camera, which the USST included as a kind of scientific pet project on photosynthesis.

“Near-infrared is not quite in the infrared range, so you can still see it with a camera but it’s not true infrared as far as scientific spectrums go,” Shirley said. “The idea behind it was that when photosynthesis happens in trees, it’s absorbing all of the visible light and reflects infrared light. You can see the leaves and they want the visible light from the sun because that’s the most powerful light that comes from the sun and when that’s happening the most it’s actually reflecting as much infrared as it can — the idea being that when you look with an infrared camera you can actually see where the most photosynthesis is happening in fields and in farmyards and in trees.”

Thus far, the infrared camera has yielded mixed results and the USST is currently pursuing further ways to definitively quantify their data beyond the visually interesting photographs it produced.

“We still need to look at different ways to analyze these pictures. They kind of look like black and white pictures with really bright white spots where you see a lot of photosynthesis,” Shirley said.

The project also collected some information on ultraviolet radiation as well as the strength of the sun’s rays at high altitudes through the use of onboard solar cells and a UV sensor, though the resulting data may be more indicative of the craft’s direction than anything.

From its first iteration to its second, the team said they learned a great deal about how to most efficiently build the HAB and that this base of knowledge has only expanded as they look to future builds.

“The first time we had a lot of wiring, a lot of tape, a lot of insulation. We had no idea what to expect, so everything was overboard,” Shirley said. “It’s definitely a lot more streamlined.”

For their third HAB launch — which is tentatively planned for the fall, though it may be put off until 2015 if the team’s schedules don’t line up — the group has been toying with the idea of including devices they refer to as ‘floaters’ in an effort to maintain stability and balloon pressure.

“It’s got a little valve that it releases gas at a certain altitude to make sure that is doesn’t pop as it gets too high. So you can get it to 20 km, get it to 30 km and then it just stays there. You have to find the balance,” Shirley said. “We haven’t figured out a way to do it yet and we don’t know if that’s in the scope of this project. It’s a simple thing but it requires a lot of testing and a lot of time and money invested to actually make that work for us.”

The team is also considering using the HAB as a means of doing community outreach with schools now that they’re more familiar with the process of designing and building one themselves, which is how the project had been originally conceived by then-president Justin Gerein.

“What he wanted to do was to contact the schools and say, ‘If your kids can think of a project, we’ll make it with them; we’ll put it in the HAL 2 balloon and we’ll put their project 30,000 meters in the air,” said Thomas Johnson, president of the USST.

In the meanwhile, the team is largely focused on their primary project: a Mars rover. First built during the 2013–14 academic year, the current version is a large metallic creature roughly the size of particularly large dog, wirelessly controlled and featuring a looming claw-like arm. Entered into the University Rover Challenge that took place last May in Parkland, Utah, the USST was pleased that their rover placed seventh overall.

Hosted by the Mars Society, the URC focuses on designs that would be beneficial to human life on the Red Planet.

“The Mars Society is a group of people that are interested in what living on Mars is going to be about. Unlike the Mars rovers and Curiosity, this rover is about being controlled by people, doing tasks that assist people side-by-side,” Shirley said. “So it would focus on things like going over rough terrain — which a scientific rover would never do — picking up tools and doing equipment servicing — which is what the arm is really, really critical for.”

The location for the URC was chosen for its geographical consistency with the surface of Earth’s neighbouring planet.

The team also plans to enter their second design into the European Rover Challenge in Poland next September. Though they considered entering their first design into the 2014 ERC, they ultimately decided it would be better to regroup for 2015.

“We were considering going in [this year] but this is our first crack at a rover,” Johnson said.

“It’d be like taking your first draft of an essay and submitting it to a book writing competition,” Shirley added.

Though they are proud of the work they did for the 2014 URC, the team plans to retrofit their current build as a show model and start fresh for the competitions in 2015.

“There’s still a  lot of problems with our design that we couldn’t have known until we actually did the competition,” Shirley said. “This was our first time doing [the URC], so there’s a lot of things we learned about what the terrain is like and what the challenges are really like outside of what the rulebook says, so we think the best idea is just to start from scratch and build a whole new rover now that we know what the true design requirements are actually going to be.”

While the team has other smaller projects that they work on periodically, Johnson and Shirley said that how the USST divides its time is largely dictated by its members.

“We’re always looking for more people. A lot of the projects we do and how far we get them really depends on how dedicated our members are that are coming in. So if we get some people coming in that are really interested in atmospheric science, than this project could really take off and get really big,” Shirley said. “The more members the better, and the more members we have possibly the more projects we can do at once, too.”

Begun by a group of master’s students in 2005, the USST has grown exponentially since it first got together to work on concepts for a space elevator — a theoretical space railroad of sorts that would involve leaving Earth without the use of rocket-propelled vehicles. The team is now largely made up of undergraduates, though Glenn Hussey of the university’s physics department does act as a faculty advisor. Still, the team is largely self-managed and only reaches out to Hussey and other faculty members in an advisory capacity.

“We’re a student run group. We make all the decisions ourselves and we do all the project management ourselves,” Johnson said. “Through the engineering faculty, we have advisors…  to help us. For instance, our finances have a fund through the university. We have a faculty advisor because we’re an engineering student group, so we give him updates on what we’re doing. But it’s really open-ended as to what we do. He just kind of makes sure we don’t do illegal things.”

Though the HAB project was a relatively simple one for the USST to tackle, especially when compared with their Mars rover, Shirley outlined the scientific benefits of undertaking it by explaining the differing conditions as you increase in altitude.

“Down on Earth it’s very easy — the temperatures are pretty mild and the pressures are normal and there’s lots of oxygen and plants and stuff — but as you get higher and higher, close to space, the temperatures get either hotter or colder depending on what area of the atmosphere you’re in and also the pressures decrease,” Shirley said. “There’s a lot of room for studying high atmosphere stuff, and the best way of doing that is launching a high altitude balloon.”

“The high altitude balloon itself is a really versatile way of getting a whole bunch of equipment up really high where it would be really hard to get a plane that high. There’s only a few planes that can go 30 km.”

Those interested in joining the USST can reach out to Johnson at pres@usst.ca or through the team’s website at usst.ca/contact.