Weather Balloon Failure Diagnosis
Sophomore Physics Project
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Weather balloons like the one shown here are used to conduct various scientific experiments. Each of the boxes shown contains different instruments for collecting different types of data.
The society that launched these balloons and conducted these experiments often found that the instruments were damaged at some point during the flight. Many were damaged to the point that they stopped collecting data and the tests had to be attempted again.
Our team designed a test to try to explain why the instruments were being damaged in flight.
The hypothesis was that the long chain of boxes experienced an effect similar to a whip crack at the moment that the balloon burst and the parachute was deployed.
Using an Arduino microcontroller, an accelerometer/gravitometer, a real-time clock, a battery pack, and a micro SD card, the acceleration of the payload was measured throughout the flight.
The acceleration graph below shows that the payload experienced a gravitational constant around 9.8 m/s^2 with minimal acceleration for the majority of the flight and a period of extremely high acceleration right around the time that it was expected that the balloon would burst.
Our team concluded that the collected data supported our hypothesis.
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