Tualatin robotics team launches weather balloon to capture panoramic view of the Earth

Matthias Weislogel’s walkie-talkie crackles to life as he speeds down Sunset Highway near Mt. Hood.

“There’s a junction up ahead, let’s head south,” the voice says.

“Pull over after this construction site, and we’ll talk about it,” Weislogel answers back.

“Copy that.”

It’s been a long day for the group of seven Tualatin High School students, and it’s barely 9 a.m.

The team is on a hunt, tracking a high-altitude weather balloon they launched from Tualatin High School earlier that morning.

Their predictions said it should have landed in Estacada, but the balloon has picked up speed and is making a bee-line for the Idaho border.

Their day began at 4 a.m., when the students on the school’s FIRST Robotics team checked the weather reports and prepared for the 7 a.m. launch of their high-altitude weather balloon.

The balloon is carrying high-definition cameras, scientific equipment and GPS trackers, in what the students hope will produce a first-of-its-kind panoramic photograph of the Earth from the upper atmosphere.

The team wanted to do something that had never been done before, Weislogel said.

“We wanted to do something to promote robotics and give back to our district,” the 17-year-old senior said. “(We wanted to) leave something important for our team in the future.”

Weislogel’s father Mark, a mechanical engineering professor at Portland State University, has been conducting high-altitude experiments for more than a decade and agreed to help the team with its experiment.

Students spent more than two months preparing the experiment, getting the right equipment and loading the balloon with its cargo: A simple looking Styrofoam package wrapped in tape.

Inside the box, however, sat 6 pounds of equipment, including two cameras, GPS trackers and a ham radio.

As soon as the balloon was launched, Weislogel, his father and the team began tracking the balloon's path online using one of three GPS locators strapped inside the equipment.

Cameras captured the balloons ascent, taking a photo every minute as the balloon reached 80,000 feet, then kicked into high gear, taking 1.2 photos per second as it continued to rise to the edge of space.

Once students collect the equipment, the hard work begins.

Students plan to take the more than 3,600 photos and stitch them together into a gigantic panoramic photo of Oregon from the edge of space, Weislogel said.

After an hour, the balloon had flown over Mt. Hood. At 15 miles up, it floated on, unimpeded as three cars of students and parents followed behind, tracking its progress through GPS monitors.

At times the balloon reached speeds of 50 miles per hour.

“We were all pretty surprised,” Weislogel said. “It busted 100,000 feet pretty quickly, then it was at 120,000, and the next thing we knew, we were in Eastern Oregon.”

The balloon reached 120,000 feet, the same height Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner would set a world record at two days later, when he became the first person to break the sound barrier in a free fall before landing safely in New Mexico.

Baumgartner’s experience falling toward Earth was similar to what happened to the balloon, Weislogel said.

With so little oxygen, the latex in the balloon shattered when it reached that height, Weislogel said.

For 10 seconds, the cameras floated weightless in a free fall as the equipment hurtled back to Earth.

A small triangular parachute helped slow the equipment, and the foam packaging should protect the equipment from harm, Weislogel said. He expects the cameras still hit the ground at more than 30 miles per hour.

The caravan tracked the device for hours, before losing its signal east of the city of Condon in Eastern Oregon, more than 170 miles from its launch site in Tualatin.

Based on calculations of its descent, the team has pinpointed its landing site to within a mile area outside the small city. After two days of searching on Friday and Saturday, the team has yet to locate the equipment.

“We know for sure what area it’s in. It’s impossible that it could go someplace else,” Weislogel said.

The team made friends with local farmers in the area, who agreed to help search.

“They wanted us to talk to the local press out there because this was the biggest thing to happen in Condon since the 1930s,” Weislogel said.

A small team of students is heading back this weekend to search for the equipment. Weislogel said they have every confidence they will retrieve the data.

But with no cell service in the area to track its whereabouts, the team is relying on on-board GPS systems, which relay information to a satellite every 17 minutes.

So far, the GPS has been eerily quiet.

“We will look in the last couple of places that it could be, but if we don’t find it this weekend, then we will have to ask some really curious questions,” he said.

Whether the equipment is found or not, Weislogel said, the experiment is already a success.

“There are a lot of possibilities for the future,” Weislogel said. “We’ve gotten emails from the community and teachers saying how cool it is. I think it really brought the community together. People are asking if we will do this again and have more community events, that’s pretty neat.”

The experiment was a dry run for this year’s robotics team, which gets into full swing in January, Weislogel said.

“It’s nice to be together and figure each other out and kick off this big successful season,” Weislogel said.

If the team did attempt another balloon launch, it wouldn’t be until near the end of the school year, when the weather clears up, Weislogel said.

But before they can think about the future, Weislogel said, they want to find their equipment first.

"We don't know what happened to it, maybe it fell into a coyote den or a UFO took it," he said, laughing. "We're just not sure."