High Altitude Ballooning at Taylor

High altitude ballooning, or the High Altitude Research Platform (HARP), is an enriching, innovative and fun way for all students to conduct their own hands-on research while studying the “near-space” environment. HARP has been used in general education and physics courses as well as being taught to other universities and K-12 educational environments. Learn more about the Balloon process and curriculum.

Watch videos on the balloon project on StratoStar’s YouTube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/StratoStar06

“Success in my professional experiences as a short-order failure analysis engineer for a major government contractor is due to the experiences I had while directing the balloon team.”
–David Patterson ‘09, student director of the HARP program (2006-2008)

The initial purpose of the HARP balloon was to test satellite instruments for TUSAT, a small satellite built by Taylor University physics students for an Air Force competition. When a test flight conducted by high school students at The King’s Academy (Jonesboro, Indiana) was successful, Taylor faculty pursued and received funding from the Indiana Space Grant Consortium – the state level branch of NASA – to continue doing outreach projects in the community.

Today, the HARP program is funded through an NSF CCLI grant, with at least 52 universities attending the balloon workshops and 30 implementing balloon into their own curriculum.

Taylor’s HARP program is an integral part of the Center for Research and Innovation. In fact, through CR&I’s incubator, Jason Krueger (TU ’06) created StratoStar Systems, LLC (link to story about them?) to sell the balloon system to other institutions and expand the balloon program into secondary education. There is much potential in future research and funding, including environmental science, biology and chemistry.

Interested in learning more? Feel free to peruse the site, watch our video or contact us if you need more information. We would love to hear from you or see you at a conference or workshop.

Please visit this page if you would like to view the current status of this project and follow the HARP balloon during it's flight.