Pennsylvania high school will be part of NASA experiment during 2024 eclipse
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A Philadelphia high school will be part of a NASA experiment during the April 8 total solar eclipse.
A team of students from Springside Chestnut Hill Academy is working with other students from Drexel University to send a weather balloon tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere to take measurements during the eclipse.
Cameron Lyon is one of four Springside seniors selected to work with Drexel students on the nationwide ballooning project backed by NASA.
"We've been preparing for this throughout our entire senior year and the last half of our junior year - preparing, communicating, going to Drexel, constructing a balloon," Lyon said.
We caught up with them just days before the celestial phenomenon.
Senior Shaun Gupte has spent endless hours working with his teammates designing and testing scientific equipment called payloads. They're attached to the research balloons.
"This captures general atmospheric data. And it then streams it down to the ground station," Gupte said.
Then the ground station team will track and livestream the balloon's course.
"They can actually see from the payload's perspective how high the balloon is. Finally, to see all of that assembled and about to be launched it's really nerve-wracking," Lyon said.
For the past year, physics teacher Alissa Sperling has helped to manage the project, even driving students last October to Texas since it's on the path of the eclipse.
There, they performed a test run to ensure the project was safe.
"The FAA does care when you launch stuff to 100,000 feet so that we are not getting in the way of planes that what we are dropping," Sperling said. "Because we do drop our payloads so that it doesn't hit anyone or anything."
Senior Devin Gibson said the trip's highlight was finding the payloads once they landed.
During the test run, Gibson participated in a Citizen Science project called Eclipse Soundscapes where he collected data on how wildlife reacts to a solar eclipse using insects.
"You had crickets ... [at] nighttime making noise and grasshoppers, which are normally daytime species, making very little noise," Gibson said.
On Eclipse Day, most will be in awe while these students anxiously await to see if their project works.
"We are hoping that through all of our even minor failures in the past we are hoping to get a big success with this one," Gupte said.