NASA Scientific Balloon Will Take Student Payloads to Stratosphere

NASA has selected nine student teams to launch scientific payloads on a NASA heavy-lift balloon for the 16th High-Altitude Student Platform (HASP) mission flying during the fall 2022 campaign in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

HASP, which is led by the Louisiana State University’s Department for Physics, is a joint project between NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility Balloon Program Office in Virginia, NASA's Science Mission Directorate, the Louisiana Space Grant Consortium in Baton Rouge, and NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas. Teams from NASA EPSCoR jurisdictions include:

• Iowa State University Cysol team will prototype a new payload to measure the 30-centimeter wavelength solar flux, or light energy, that will be the cornerstone of their CySAT CubeSat program.
  
  
• Montana State University’s student team will continue utilizing HASP for testing major components for the upcoming Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project during the solar eclipses in 2023 and 2024.
  
  
• University of North Florida and University of North Dakota will fly their payload for the ninth time with HASP, continuing to improve upon their design for measuring the ozone within Earth’s different atmospheric layers.
  
  
• University of the Virgin Islands’ student team will test their low-cost design for gamma-ray burst detections, which will be a major part of their 3U CubeSat payload.

Iowa State University and the University of the Virgin Islands will be flying for the first time on HASP.