News

Latest News!

11/30/2020

The KHS Project Horizon team is now making final preparations for the upcoming launch on 5 December. Team members have completed all of their scientific research and written their Introductions, as well as Materials and Methods. With just a few weeks to go, they are actively testing their experiments as they become comfortable with all experimental variables.

Raider III will introduce a number of new experiments thanks to our partnership with the Kaiserslautern Elementary School (KES). One of the pods going into space will be dedicated to KES. KES students wanted to know if a particular scale weight would change once it was brought into the upper atmosphere. We took that idea and engineered an experiment to satisfy their curiosity. Additionally, students wanted to know if magic marker ink would exit the marker tip in space. We have also designed an experiment to test just that. To extend that understanding, our team elected to conduct a capillary experiment to see the capillary effects of plant life at .15 psi.

Additional experiments included within our triple-pod payload will include:

  1. Algae experiment with on-board colorimeter to measure algae and medium changes.

  2. Spectrum Sensor to measure possible Blue Shift/Red Shift changes in frequency.

  3. Affects of atmosphere on sound. Ultrasonic transmitters and receivers will compare frequency and amplitude between two identical speaker systems (one with and one without pressure changes).

  4. Ozone concentration

The Raider III flight will take place in the Kaiserslautern area. The team will once again be able to virtually direct ground crews to the payload location. Stay Tuned!!


Raider II Mission Success. The Project Horizon team completed their second successful high altitude balloon (HAB) launch on 7 June, 2020 in the vineyards of Bad Durkeheim, Germany. Due to the Covid-19 school closures and social distance restrictions, students were unable to physically attend the launch. The KHS Project Horizon team established a virtual Command and Control Center and provided ground crews with tracking information from the comfort of their homes.

The Raider II mission had a number of specific objectives that were met:

    • Exceed Raider I altitude with a height of 35,596 meters

    • Obtained new sensory readings for comparative studies using new Geiger counter & ozone sensor

    • Improved Video (extra cameras and power systems)

    • Enhanced Tracking (included APRS)

During the Summer Break and into the start of the 2020/2021 school year, the Raider team will continue to analyze and interpret the data that will either validate or invalidate a number of hypotheses established throughout the school year.