At 10:35 a.m. on August 21, 2017, in a field in front
of a small Nebraska Panhandle farmhouse, a team consisting of SD Mines
students, Black Hills area high school students, teachers and community
members, meticulously followed a set of steps they had practiced many times
before. Payloads were carefully secured, batteries checked, and scientific
instruments turned on and tested. Soon, helium was coursing through a hose from
tanks in the back of a pickup truck into an eight-foot-tall balloon laid out on
the soft grass.
Above the
desolate cornfields and sandhills of northwestern Nebraska the moon was
starting its path across the sun–the arc of its shadow racing across the
country toward this team. The Great American Eclipse was underway.
The South Dakota Solar Eclipse Balloon Team had been
working for two years to prepare for this one sliver in time. Their goal—to
launch this balloon at the exact moment to loft the payload to an altitude of
about 100,000 feet, under the moon’s shadow, during two minutes of totality. On
board were video cameras, a radiation detector, GPS, and other scientific
experiments. This project aimed to capture images and data from the eclipse.
The radiation detector would help measure the flux of cosmic rays in the upper
atmosphere as the moon obscured the sun. The video cameras would capture the
circle of the moon’s shadow on the earth. The team designed and built some of
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