HABET has evolved into a student-driven near-space research program operating at the edge of space. After being selected as one of only five high school teams nationwide for NASA’s Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, we successfully launched stratospheric missions during both the 2023 annular eclipse in Oregon and the 2024 total solar eclipse in Vermont. These coordinated national campaigns allowed our team to collect atmospheric data related to eclipse-driven gravity waves and upper-atmospheric dynamics while operating under professional-level launch, instrumentation, and reporting standards.

Since then, our work has expanded into solar maximum and space weather research through participation in Project HERA, a multi-institution high-altitude balloon collaboration. Students now design and deploy radiation and muon detection systems, develop custom embedded flight computers, conduct extreme-environment thermal testing, and contribute synchronized atmospheric datasets to broader scientific efforts. HABET students are not just launching balloons — they are engineering flight systems, analyzing complex data, and presenting research to the wider scientific community.