Weather balloon launches above Hollister in hopes of landing youth interest in STEM courses

A weather balloon went soaring high above the city of Hollister recently, attracting onlookers who visited San Benito High School to watch the launch take place on school grounds.

The imagery that came back was astonishing, but the weather balloon project designers want people to take that interest and apply it to STEM courses.

“People love balloons,” says Kevin Bonvie with Teknova Inc. “To see one 4 to 5 feet in diameter go up in the air like that was spectacular.”

The structure of the project consisted of a latex balloon filled with helium, of course, as well as a couple of GoPros, a GPS unit and a small flight computer.

It’s peak height was about 85,000 feet but surely what went up had to come down as well.

“It did land on private property. What I do suggest is anyone who is willing to do this is to not go trespassing,” says Bonvie. “We were able to contact the property owner and retrieve our equipment.”

The popped weather balloon and its equipment sat about 80 miles from it’s initial launch site. It landed near Coalinga, which is about a two hour drive from Hollister.

Another piece of protocol Teknova Inc staff had to consider was proximity of their work site to an airport. Since they were too close to one, they had to launch from San Benito High.

“Thousands of weather balloons launched every day to track air streams, weather and to track other data. It’s a real drop in the bucket the type of people doing this type of thing,” Bonvie says.

Once all the protocol was taken care of and the balloon was in flight you could see in the video the colors of the landscape and the black of space surrounding earth.

It was at its peak of about 85,000 feet when atmospheric pressure data showed 0.06psi. That’s when the balloon popped and began to fall back down to earth.

Bonvie says where we were standing for the interview was about 14.5 psi so the difference in atmospheric pressure was in double digits.

Besides the temperature change as the balloon went up, Bonvie found other rewards with launching a weather balloon into the air.

“Not everybody has the opportunity to be a part of a project like that. To be presented with something new, a challenge,” he says. “You don’t know someone’s potential until you put something like that in front of them to make them try to solve those problems.”