The Nebraska Star Party, which takes place at Merritt Reservoir near Valentine, NE, was celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The theme incorporated the relationship of astronomy and NASA so we felt it would be advantageous to have the NASA-Nebraska High Altitude Ballooning  (NHAB) group do a launch for demonstration for the participants of the star party and to do some science from contributing partners.

The Society of Physics Students (SPS) at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and a Robotics FIRST club from Lincoln Public Schools answered the call for experiments for the flight. The SPS pod was measuring cosmic rays with a self-contained radiation monitor and the robotics club had a system of experiments recording on a Raspberry Pi computer.

We woke early to a beautiful, clear morning on Tuesday, August 7th, 2018 for our 72nd flight.

We were joined with Mark Conner from NSTAR and Paul Verhage (NEARSYS) who were planning to do a separate HAB flight that was to be released at the same time as ours.

Photo credit: Erik Larsen

Photo credit: Erik Larsen

When the balloons were released, they came fairly close to being tangled, but then separated and continued on their ways.

Here is a 360 video from Paul Verhage. Be sure to use the controls to look up at the balloons after they are released.

As we were leaving to retrieve our payloads, we heard that the other balloon was on its way down and we didn’t know what happened to it. After we looked at the footage from the balloon, we figured out what happened.

This video is entitled 4 misses and a hit.

This was the first of two unforgettable things that happened on this flight. We said that in the first game of High Altitude Balloon Joust, we were the victors.

Here are some still images from the Go Pro 4 video camera from our balloon.

Merritt Reservoir The collision happened around 15,000 ft.

Then, the second weird thing happened. Our balloon twisted so much that it detached from our payloads around 70,000 ft. and continued on its merry way.

We were worried about the recovery because the Sandhills can have large ranches with very few roads as opposed to the neat one mile by one mile grids we often run into in southern Nebraska and Iowa. Here was the flight path as recorded on APRS.

We were fortunate that the payloads landed a little over 3 miles from the road. We were able to drive up to a rancher’s house and his daughter took Michael Sibbernsen and Bryan Schaff using a UTV to pick it up.

Photo Credit: Bryan Schaff

Our thanks to Rebecca Higgins for helping us recover our equipment. She was home from college where she is studying science education.

We were able to come up with a presentation for Thursday afternoon (8/9/18) at the Valentine High School. Michael was asked to emcee the afternoon presentations.

Photo credit: Brett Boller

We were also able enjoy the beautiful dark skies of the Nebraska Star Party. We wish to thank the Nebraska Star Party planners for inviting us. We had a wonderful time!