Sir George Simpson students brought back some stunning shots from the Earth’s upper atmosphere last month following their latest successful weather balloon launch.
Sir George Simpson students brought back some stunning shots from the Earth’s upper atmosphere last month following their latest successful weather balloon launch.
Simpson teacher Tony Rafaat posted a few of the shots retrieved from the school’s SABLE-6 probe online this week. The probe had been launched on May 26.
This was the third time that the school had performed the St. Albert Balloon Launch Experiment, which is designed to teach students about physics and atmospheric science.
“This year, we experimented with a spherical payload we called the Sphere of Knowledge,” Rafaat said. Instead of putting their video camera in a box, the SABLE student team put it in a Styrofoam ball so it would have an unrestricted 127-degree view of space. The ball was wrapped in aluminum foil tape and decorated with Canadian flags.
The helium-filled balloon launched from the school grounds at about 8 a.m., Rafaat said, hitting its peak altitude of 38.63 kilometres above sea level about three hours later. The balloon then popped, sending the probe plummeting back to Earth to land in a tree south of Alberta Beach.
The SABLE team planned to post a video of the flight later this month, Rafaat said.
They may have finished in eighth place, but the Bellerose Reach team had its heads held high this week after coming home from nationals.
Nine Bellerose Composite High students travelled to the University of Toronto on May 25 for the national Reach for the Top tournament. The students had previously taken first place at provincials held at Bellerose on April 21, giving them the honour of representing Alberta in the contest.
Reach for the Top is a popular Canadian quiz competition where teams of high-school students compete to see who can correctly answer the most trivia questions.
The team played 12 games on the first day of the tournament in 30-some degree weather, said team member Graeme Matichuk. “Especially with the heat and the humidity, it was pretty tiring.”
That got them into the quarter-finals, where they faced the juggernaut that was the University of Toronto Schools team.
“They didn’t completely obliterate us,” Matichuk said, as some Reach matches are won by about 250 points, but it was still a pretty intense match.
Bellerose lost 390 to 140, finishing eighth out of 13 overall. The U of T went undefeated for the tournament to become this year’s national champion.
Matichuk said he had a lot of fun exploring Toronto and meeting teams from across the nation. “We were proud we had made it that far.”
Matichuk said he was too old to do Reach next year, but encouraged other students to give it a shot. “No matter how well you do, it’s a great experience.”
