CHS students make NASA pitch for balloon testing

Ten Carson High School engineering students have submitted a research proposal as part of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) challenge that would help them develop the technology to build a high-altitude balloon.

The students, who have been measuring muon count and ionizing radiation at varying altitudes for their project, started their work early this semester, thanks to the interest of team leader Bebe Kiel, a junior.

She and fellow students Ivan Usquiano, Pierce Adams, Aaron Witt, Tyler Burdett, Shingo Copeland, Evan Silva, Ricardo Flores, Hailey Torres and Kevin Tapia have been exploring research previously done at Georgia State University and the Department of Energy.

“I was watching NASA TV — as I do — and they were doing announcement videos and they were talking about the student challenge,” Kiel said. “I thought it’d be really cool. I was really excited that my classmates were enthusiastic about joining in the project with me.”

The NASA TechRise Student Challenge is now in its third year and administered by Future Engineers, which hosts online challenges for K-12 students. The competition invites teams of four or more students in grades six to 12 to submit experiment ideas for a high-altitude balloon or rocket-power lander test flight. Students are encouraged to develop the payload design and suborbital flight test process and learn more about space exploration, Earth observation, coding, electronics and the significance of test data.

Sixty winning teams will be chosen, each receiving $1,500 to build their payloads and being awarded an assigned spot on a NASA-sponsored commercial flight. The high-altitude balloon flight tests will offer about four hours of flight time at 70,000 feet and exposure to Earth’s atmosphere, high-altitude radiation and perspective views of the planet. Rocket-powered lander flight tests will fly for approximately two minutes at 80 feet over a test field designed to look like the moon’s surface.

The students, including three first-year and seven third-year engineering students, plan to evaluate the performance of small muon detectors that use scintillating plastic/silicon photomultipliers as well as the performance of the electronics pocket Geiger counters.

Muons, the team defined in its proposal, are unstable subatomic particles of the lepton class that penetrate any material, “even miles deep into the Earth’s surface.” The team will compare its data to others’ experimental values of muon flux at altitude, such as from the University of Northern Colorado.

Engineering teachers Evelyn Grime and Kirstin Kolstad have partnered to help their students for the challenge.

“After attending school only part-time due to chronic illnesses her freshman and sophomore year, Kiel is back in school full-time and setting the pace for everyone around her with an amazing attitude,” Grime said.

Grime, who has a background in architecture, said ultimately if the students don’t capture funding from the challenge, she and Kolstad would help raise the funds for the project. The students, using computer-aided design software and hand tools, have been developing their project in the shop.

Students “use the computers for the software that lets them design and create the drawings and the models, and they take that and apply it and see if it works in wood or metal,” Grime said.

The students’ work caught the attention of the district administration. At the school board meeting Nov. 14, Superintendent Andrew Feuling read snippets of their technical language, trying to explain how they would solve their challenge.

“I am incredibly proud of our high school engineering team for their exceptional dedication and ingenuity," Feuling said. “Their relentless pursuit of excellence not only exemplifies the spirit of innovation within our educational community but also serves as a testament to the limitless potential of our students.”

Grime, who oversaw the proofreading and offered guidance, said the students explored concepts and ideas and worked together in ways she “couldn’t have imagined.”

“They hit language levels and aspects of their proposal that I had stop and go, ‘I need to educate myself about what they’re looking at because this is not my area of expertise,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘How do you say that word?’”

She also said they showed an inspiring sense of emotional maturity and were open to constructive criticism.

Grime said the team had to learn how to work under higher expectations, and the TechRise challenge was motivational for them. Their proposal asked about what they would measure, monitor or evaluate during the high-altitude flight, the background research they had done, their hypothesis and components to use during their experiment. Kiel said they worked with peers at school as well as professors at the Jack C. Davis Observatory at Western Nevada College for guidance.

“In engineering, you need to make sure that everything is feasible, not just an idea because we were working with certain constraints,” Burdett said. “We had to make sure it could fit inside the box literally and figuratively.”

Winners will be announced Jan. 23 and teams will receive a welcome package and begin building their experiment. Each team will meet frequently with the TechRise advisory team. Experiments must be mailed to Future Engineers by May 17. The experiments will launch on their corresponding flight test vehicles next summer.

For more information about the project, contact Grime at egrime@carson.k12.nv.us or Kolstad at kkolstad@carson.k12.nv.us.