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The Story
The Story
This year's balloon chasers included Mrs. Brode, Mr. Brode, and the infamous Daniel Brode. They left the school at 11:30 am armed with a laptop, cell phones, a HAM radio, and a 2-L bottle of Mountain Dew. A few minutes after leaving the school, the projection team forwarded the current position of the balloon with the latest predicted landing site. This projection said the balloon was going to land much further away that predicted. Now the balloon was predicted to land about 80 miles east of the original projection. It was going to be a long day for the Brode's.
Inflight Prediction made at 11:55 am
"Ring. Ring. Hello. Pause. WHAT! The OCEAN! No way. We forgot to bring our swimming suits." The previous conglomeration of words and punctuation symbols describe the second conversation with the projection team. The balloon was rising much slower than expected due to the helium tank running out early. Now the team predicted that it was going to land over 20 miles from shore in the Atlantic Ocean. This would be a disaster.
At 12:17 pm, another call from the projection team brought good news. There was an error in the calculations. The new landing site was not in the ocean.
The next picture shows the location of the balloon at 12:59 pm. The balloon is is actually in Maryland which was not where the previous prediction had it going. What is going on here.
The final signal from the tracking device had the balloon near New Texas, PA traveling at 43 mph towards the Susquehanna River. It was still at an altitude of over 15,000 ft.
At 43 mph, the balloon should have landed shortly after 2 pm. A closer look at the path of the balloon led the Brode's to look in the area below. (Approximately 12 square miles!)
The search party arrived around 2:30 pm and began driving down all of the roads in the region. Most of the area consisted of fields that were easy to view from the car. Periodic stops were made to search areas that were out of view. After four hours of searching, the Brode's gave-up for the day and began their three and a half hour journey to their home in Cumberland, MD.
On Saturday, Mr. Brode took a closer look at the data and discovered that some of the data used to create the graph were out of order. After reorganizing the data, Excel was used to develop a mathematical model to predict the landing site coordinates. The probable landing site was in the opposite direction from the search area. There was heavy rains both Saturday and Sunday, so recovery efforts were postponed until the following week.
On Monday morning, Mr. Brode received a phone call from a manager at the dairy farm. She said a worker found our green and orange boxes in a field around 2:00 in the afternoon on Friday. The worker did not know what they were so he placed the boxes in her office. He did not speak English and was unable to read the signs on the boxes. Next year, we will include signs in multiple languages. Since the boxes were inside, they were protected from the heavy rain which might have destroyed are equipment. Mr. Brode retrieved our equipment on Tuesday after school. On Wednesday, the student’s began analyzing the data from the experiments.
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