NEW SCOTLAND — A recovered weather balloon in Columbia County last week spelled success for Voorheesville’s Advanced Placement physics students’ yearlong project — the launch of a camera-laden balloon into near space to measure the curvature of the Earth.

The former physics students, now graduated, are compiling the data gathered during the flight, including pictures they obtained of space.

“To reach 100,000 feet with our balloon is our ultimate goal,” high school senior Alexandra Cunningham told The Enterprise last March, when the project, called “Project Icarus,” was just getting underway.

Students had calculated that, if the balloon reached that height, it would descend and land in Ghent. They followed it by car all the way to the Columbia County airport, after losing the balloon’s global positioning system signal. The students did not find the balloon and its camera, but accepted and celebrated the unending pursuit of science, then moved on to college.

The balloon was found in a tree in Stuyvesant Falls, only six miles from its expected destination, according to former physics student Ben Mackay. Those who found it contacted the school last week.

“It was a great project,” physics teacher Ted Simons told The Enterprise. “Those who actually launched it went to retrieve it.”

Once the school was contacted, Simons spread the word to his former students who were home on winter break, and they agreed to recover the camera together before heading back to college.

Renters of a home owned by Jean Hewig noticed the balloon in August, Mackay wrote to The Enterprise in an email.

“They were back in their house for the fall and, when the leaves came down, they discovered that something more was going on when they spotted the faded orange payload dangling down,” he wrote.

Hewig and her friends used a slingshot, two shotguns, and a chainsaw to retrieve the box with the camera and sensors attached to the balloon, Mackay wrote. They told him that they watched the GoPro camera footage at Thanksgiving, and called Mackay’s cell number from the box in December, but did not leave a message, he said.

“Later, they made out ‘Voorheesville’ in very faded sharpie, and decided to call the school once winter break was over,” Mackay wrote.

“Schuyler King, Sean Clair, Erik Patak, Alexandra Cunningham, Braeden Morrison, and I drove down to Stuyvesant Falls to pick up the payload,” Mackay wrote.  “We met Jean and her friend, who shot it out of the tree.”

“The balloon traveled 64 miles in one hour and 36 minutes,” Mackay wrote in an email to The Enterprise. “It followed its projected course pretty closely; the Columbia County airport where we ended up during our search in June is 10 minutes away [from the house where it was found]. Unfortunately, our altitude data cut out above 30,000 feet, but, due to the duration of the flight before the balloon burst, and the fact that the balloon burst, we believe we were successful in lofting our payload above 100,000 feet — the balloon bursting is significant, as the predicted burst altitude for a 40-foot diameter balloon with no payload is 120,000 feet. So, with our small payload, we believe it reached at least 100,000 feet.” 

“It was quite an undertaking,” Simons told The Enterprise. “The AP physics is a capstone science class at Voorheesville.”

Simons said that he pursued the project so students could incorporate biology, Earth science, “and all the skills they should have acquired in their high school years.”

“In school labs, everything is set up for you and everything has a specific purpose and is laid out in a concise procedure,” former student Erik Patak said in March. “Here, we have to engineer ways to make our electronics work with one another for a real-life situation that holds some weight, not only for us, but for the community.” 

Simons said this week that the students are examining their data.

“Most of the curvature in the photos is due to the fisheye lenses on the cameras, not the curvature of the Earth,” Mackay wrote.

About the video footage, Simons said, “It’s very impressive.”

Patak edited the footage and placed a 10-minute video titled “Project Icarus” on his Youtube channel. 

“We still do not know what caused our GPS failure back in June,” Mackay wrote. “Most of us are still in disbelief that we found it; we gave up and forgot about it once we left for college.”

Former superintendent Theresa Thayer Snyder shared her thoughts on the project and its recovery publicly on her Facebook page, noting that the students were asked by Simons, “How would we go about taking a picture of the curvature of the earth?

“That question launched a yearlong project in which the students determined what they would need to do to send a camera miles and miles into space to capture a picture of the curvature of the earth,” Snyder wrote. “They had to work with the Federal Aviation Agency; they had to research how to legally transport helium; they had to develop grant proposals to fund their research and their experiments; they had to develop a plan for at least a couple of them to become trained radio operators; they studied weather patterns and learned to measure prevailing winds; they predicted a target landing area and selected a best date option for launch.

“They worked tirelessly, together, to create a project…that would accomplish their goal of taking a picture of the curvature of the earth,” Snyder continued. “In the interests of cooperation with the rest of the school, the students presented their project to the middle school students and to the elementary children, so that each level could devise and send an experiment along in the cargo device.

“Here, as in real science, every failure is instructive,” she continued. “I know these eager, enthusiastic, able young scientists learned more from that yearlong trek into space than they learned from any state or local exam — or other common academic measure.  Learning is complex and messy — and so incredibly captivating in its most authentic manifestations.”

Snyder shared thanks and praise, writing, “This is what I want for my students — to grapple with questions and to struggle to discover that finding solutions requires enormous commitment, dedication, and a willingness to roll up one’s sleeves and get dirty, and sometimes, even disappointment.  There is nothing reductionist about such learning.  My thanks to the teachers who pose the questions that stimulate such efforts — and my thanks to those same teachers for stepping back and trusting that their students will figure it out.”

Simons said that he is not repeating the project this year.

“I wanted to keep the classes fresh,” he said. “I would like to do something like it, again. I don’t know what that is. This particular project ended with their graduation. The adventure of it is part of the allure for the student. I gave a project, the kids did it — the kids did the work.”

 Simons concluded, “Science takes a little time, sometimes.”