Stratospheric ballooning

When professor James Flaten and 20 students from his University of Minnesota class launched four balloons in mid-April, he knew some of the equipment wasn’t working properly.

Flaten wasn’t sure if he would ever see the satellite tracker attached to one of the balloons again. But alert Steele County residents, a persistent county sheriff and a knowledgeable IT department made all the difference for the professor.

On a recent Sunday morning, Jeremy Bauer and his wife Amy came across some unusual devices in the sand of a pond by their place east of Hope. “The first thing you think of is the Chinese Weather Balloon,” said Jeremy Bauer. “It’s crazy the stuff that falls from the sky.”

Bauer’s wife told him not to touch anything, but let’s just say curiosity got the best of him. “I was a typical guy. There was a button, and I pushed it,” said Jeremy Bauer, adding it immediately started to beep.

Thinking it came from some sort of weather balloon, the Bauers reached out to the National Weather Service. No luck. Their next call was to Sheriff Lon Thiele, who was just heading to church. After church, Thiele responded to Bauers to confiscate the suspicious items, which included batteries, GPS tracker and some NASA stickers.

“The first thing I thought of with batteries and wires is that it was something of the worst,” said Thiele. But, he added, once he got close enough, he could tell it was some kind of experiment.

And, as the sheriff found, that’s when the real fun took place over the next several days.

Thiele took the items to the county’s IT gurus, Dave Purscell and Christina Wassell. They were able to find an identifier on the transmitter and some photographs on a social media site linking the equipment to a balloon experiment involving the U of M’s Flaten.

Through social media, Thiele found a phone number to Flaten, who confirmed the found equipment belonged to one of the balloons his class launched from Madelia High School on April 13. Flaten explained to Thiele that they were doing flight experiments.

Flaten retrieved the equipment from the sheriff’s office last week.

The professor shared photographs of the launch with the Steele County Times from a camera with lenses in two spots that were attached to the balloons. Flaten found that the balloon burst 19 minutes after takeoff at about 107,000 feet in the air. The main balloon landed near Hayfield, but he had no idea where the tracker and other contents ended up until Thiele notified him.

Prior to the launch, Flaten said one of the trackers was broken. “We tried to fix it, but we did not succeed,” he said. “I’m glad to get it back. It’s an expensive piece of equipment.”

Flaten said this was his 220^th flight since he came to the U of M in 2007. He regularly launches the flights from southern Minnesota, which he says is ideal because there aren’t too many trees or lakes to battle. He also stays away from major roads and cities.

“I’ve become an academic balloonist,” he said, noting his goal is to give students “a NASA-type experience” without leaving Minnesota. “My job is to motivate students for aerospace. This is as close as you can get to space flight within staying in Minnesota,” Flaten said. “We are flying in outer space. I get excited about the things NASA is into.”

He said students analyze data from the flights, mostly to do an analysis of trajectories.

Flaten will be hosting a conference for college-level balloonists from around the country at the end of May.

“I love doing this,” Flaten said. “Sometimes people discover something quite stunning.”

For the Bauers, they are happy to have found an answer to the mysterious parts that ended up on their property.

“Curiosity got to me,” Jeremy Bauer said. “Other people would have thrown it away.”