SCSU Students Study Solar Eclipse

(KNSI) – St. Cloud State University students headed to the deserts of New Mexico this weekend as part of the nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project.

Assistant Professor Rachel Humphrey spoke with KNSI about what they were trying to accomplish. “One of the things that NASA and the space grant is especially interested in looking at, and what the students will be analyzing after all the data has been compiled, is whether the presence of an eclipse can generate these gravity waves, specifically in the stratosphere.”

The ground level is the troposphere. The stratosphere isn’t reached until you are tens of thousands of feet above the earth’s surface.

The students helped collect thirty hours of data in the lead-up to, during, and after the eclipse.

Here in Minnesota, we were well away from the path of totality, and dark clouds obscured the fact that anything out of the normal was happening. The balloons were a test run for another eclipse set for April 2024. That will pass much closer to our area.

Humphrey says the balloon readings have a second purpose as well. “A smaller portion of this project involves taking some acoustic samples of what’s going on around the deployment site, so looking at insects and how loud they are, how quiet they get, and things like that. Birds, other animals that depend on the sun to determine their behavior.”

Humphrey says the balloons and the equipment were not tracked and are not intended to be recovered. They eventually get so high in the air that they pop, and then the sensors parachute back down, where they land gently in parts unknown. They are carried for hundreds of miles by winds in the upper atmosphere.

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