Dear AAHAB-1 Team Members:

I am still floating from the major success of the balloon launch. I hope you all know how much of an achievement this project was. Each one of you contributed in a major way to its success and it was obvious to everyone in attendance for your debriefing presentation at Breakfast Club on Thursday. Congratulations! This is just the beginning of many great things to come. I hope that the AAHAB-1 near space probe project has demonstrated to everyone that ingenuity is not dead. Just as Franklin flew a key on a kite in a thunderstorm, we used (somewhat) ordinary materials to make and discover some truly awesome things. Our efforts and dedication as “makers” and “hackers” (good hackers who hack together technology to work for them) paid off in a big way.

Suzie has asked that I get you all together one last time to help me document the project for posterity in your own words. As the pioneers of the Anacapa Near Space Exploration program you are among the first high school students in the world to create a project like this. Others have done this at the university level and with much help and many failed attempts. You must recognize that AAHAB-1 was truly an achievement for makers of any level and you are trailblazers for future near space explorers both at Anacapa and beyond. The data we collected and the design we used to collect it is important to preserve for the future.

Sincerely,
Levi C. Maaia
ANSEC Faculty Advisor

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AAHAB-1 reached an altitude greater than 90,000 feet overlooking the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo Bay and the Pismo Dunes.

• See more photos in the Facebook album.
• S.B. News-Press: Students explore atmosphere with balloon-equipped camera
• S.B. Independent: Anacapa School Skirts the Stratosphere
• KCLU Public Radio: Lance Orozco’s radio feature story
• S.B. EdHat: Anacapa School’s Launch a Success
• Noozhawk: Anacapa School Project Soars to Stratospheric Heights — Then Lands Safely

The Anacapa School’s Near Space Exploration Club (ANSEC) successfully recovered its high-altitude balloon after a weekend flight, which returned stunning photos and environmental data from the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

On Saturday, May 21, 2011, at 9:43 a.m., ANSEC members Julio Bernal, Aubrey Cazabat, Christian Eckert and Connor Proctor along with faculty advisor Levi Maaia launched the club’s first near space balloon probe, AAHAB-1, from a site east of Paso Robles in the small community of Shandon, Calif. The group’s mission was to gather photos and environmental data as the balloon passed through the stratosphere.

The ANSEC team calculated the balloon's lift in order to ensure the craft would climb quickly.

After the probe’s two-hour and 10-minute flight over the California Central Coast, the team recovered the payload in rural Kings County, Calif., twenty miles northeast of the launch site.

“We worked so hard on this project,” said senior Aubrey Cazabat. “It was such an amazing feeling to see the capsule back on the ground and to know that we had done it!”

From the top of the balloon’s 91,122-foot ascent above 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, the camera had a view as far as 400 miles in all directions under a black, near space sky. The capsule’s GPS radio tracking signal was heard by amateur radio stations as far away as San Diego and Mendocino Counties.

After beginning this project in the late fall, the Anacapa students quickly learned that they had a steep learning curve ahead as they tackled challenges from wind and flight path prediction to engineering a sturdy but lightweight capsule that could survive brutally cold conditions and hurricane-force winds. Despite these hurdles, the club achieved all of its goals and retrieved extensive environmental data, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and radiation exposure levels, along with stunning photos of Earth’s curved surface.

“We picked up some ice on the camera window, which can be seen in a few of the higher level shots,” said senior Connor Proctor. “Other than that, all of our critical systems worked flawlessly.”

Data from the flight, including photos, a map of the flight path and environmental data, can be found at the school’s Web site www.anacapaschool.org.

Anacapa School is an independent, co-educational, WASC–accredited, college preparatory day school for junior high and high school students in grades 7-12. Founded in 1981 by Headmaster Gordon Sichi, Anacapa enjoys the best student-teacher ratio of any school, public or private, in Santa Barbara at its historic campus located in the heart of the Santa Barbara civic center.

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Yesterday, Lance Orozco from the NPR affiliate station in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties came to the Anacapa School to interview my students and me about our plans to launch the Anacapa Amateur High Altitude Balloon 1 (AAHAB-1) on Saturday.  His story aired this morning on KCLU.

Listen to KCLU’s radio news story (mp3 | 6m 31s)

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Over the past few years the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices, as well as compact and light-weight digital photography, has helped give bloom to a burgeoning movement of amateur balloonists.  These are not the Around the World in 80 Days-types that hope to circumnavigate the globe in a luxury appointed airship, but rather groups of hackers and makers who combine smart phones and Arduinos to create sophisticated weather balloons for a fraction of the cost traditionally spent by the National Weather Service and the U.S. military to explore the upper atmosphere.  Near space, specifically the region of the Earth’s atmosphere between 65,000 and 100,000 feet above sea level (MSL), is the destination of choice for these amateur explorers.

Just about six months ago, four high school students from Anacapa School and I began planning to launch a high altitude balloon.  Anacapa School is not the first educational group to attempt a flight like this (college-age MIT students from the 1337arts group claim to have done it for $150 in 2009), but we are certainly the first high school club in this region to organize a student-run flight.  Our group, the Anacapa Near Space Exploration Club (ANSEC), decided that its radiosonde should contain the typical digital camera as well as a number of additional instruments to measure barometric pressure, temperature, humidity and even radiation levels in the environment both inside and outside of the four-pound foam cooler.

Few Earth-bound objects ever find their way up to the thin air of 100,000 feet MSL, the altitude at which we expect our balloon will burst and begin its return to the surface.  A typical jet airliner tops off below 40,000 feet and even the most powerful military jets are just now finding their way above 60,000 ft.  At its apex over Central California, AAHAB-1′s onboard camera will be able to see (assuming clear skies and high visibility) from San Francisco to Mexico to Las Vegas, over 400 miles in all directions, while the barometer will measure less than one percent of the atmospheric pressure found at sea level (99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere will be below the probe at this height).

The launch, weather permitting, is scheduled to take place Saturday May 21, from one of several predetermined launch sites on the Central Coast of California.  Over the next couple weeks I will continue posting information here on Maaia.com, including a complete project report and instructions to teachers and other individuals who wish to replicate a similar flight.  For those interested in tracking the progress of the flight, we are using the amateur radio Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) to track AAHAB-1 using amateur radio call sign K6LCM-11.  The onboard APRS unit will send frequent position reports to amateur radio stations across the region which will, in turn, map the flight on APRS.fi in real-time.  Click here to follow along on Saturday morning using a Google Maps-based APRS system.

The first media release we sent out about the project from Anacapa School explains some more details about the flight as well.  Stay tuned for more followup information.

Update May 21, 2011: Listen to the public radio story about the launch!

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Today ComCreations completed the launch of the Anacapa School’s new online portal.  The new site replaces a nearly 10 year old design.  By using WordPress and a theme based on Modularity Lite, the new site allows the office staff to make easy updates, as well as feature various school events and activities on the front page with a gorgeous slideshow that automatically pulls photos from the most recent “Latest News” posts.  This project was the result of a tremendous effort by all of the faculty and staff at the school whom all contributed to the revision of Anacapa’s online presence.

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A performance by some of my students in The Anacapa School Band on Santa Barbara Channels cable 17 Teen Network News

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