“As an amateur scientist and innovator, I focus on solving strategic small things today to make big differences tomorrow.”
How did you get started as a maker?
I was into making as early as I can remember: strongly encouraged by my tinkering parents to take things apart, build kits, and investigate how things worked. In high school I began to document ideas for things that I couldn’t solve due to my lack of skills, and was finally able to improve my electronics, mechanical, and software abilities once the information began to appear on the Internet. Local public libraries were simply too limited in scope for the unusual problems I was interested in, such as robotic vacuum cleaners, antimatter particle physics, and autonomous balloon flight. I also became frustrated that I was not that good at any particular technical activity in making. While in college, I realized that most people there viewed making and tinkering as a time-killing hobby that had little use in the real world. Since no one else was really interested in it, I let such inventive investigation drop for many years.
What made you pick it up again?
I worked for a few years doing IT work and even at the top level, such work and planning involves no groundbreaking ideas or problem solving. I realized that there are a lot of people who all look at problems the same way and I wanted to contribute much more constructive things to the world instead. This led to my passion for doing the things that push forward. I never dreamed I’d be developing the state of the art for the rest of the amateur world.
Right now my making focuses a lot on building tools that allow others to do more science and have the tools to investigate the planet right alongside NASA. For example, I’m working with Open Science Kentucky to develop a central clearinghouse for live, amateur experiment data collection so it is immediately open and available to all.
Would you mind telling me more about Open Science Kentucky?
Open Science Kentucky (OSKY) is an organization that primarily works on getting academic, scientific papers out of paid journals and developing standards for providing all research data openly for others to verify in an online form. I started meeting with them a few months ago after they approached me at a LVL1 Hackerspace meeting. They had heard about the White Star Balloon project’s scientific goals and our problems trying to get access to balloon-related science data behind academic journal paywalls. They weren’t aware of the volume of amateur science that already takes place until we met, but they quickly understood how much we all need access to real science results.
I’m working with them to build a better set of science experimental tools, author amateur science maker guidelines for simple ways to collect reliable experimental results, and provide easy cloud-storage of their data. Although I can’t improve on old standard lab tools such as test tubes, I can make electronic sensors to digitally keep track of results such as pH, pressure, temperature, and flow rate. Incorporating vision tools such as RoboRealm and the Microsoft Kinect will help to measure physical movements, visual changes and growth rates too. These tools all exist, but at the low budget amateur level, they require a lot of work to electrically interface or even to convert the various outputs for visualization. It would be nice to build them on a commonly available, widely supported platform such as Arduino and keep it all open source in the interest of more rapid progress, instead of more rapid profit.
Speaking of open source projects, let’s talk about your main one, the White Star Balloon project. What are the goals for the flight season this year and what have you accomplished thus far?
This year our primary goal is to become the first amateurs to send a robotic weather balloon across the Atlantic Ocean. Besides completing a record-setting flight, our science goal is to document the helium temperature changes in this small balloon. We’ve begun working with the Delorme GPS Company to figure out how our robot will phone home using their new InReach satellite messaging system. Last year we used a different satellite company that required too much work for us part-time volunteers to implement in time to fly. At this point, we’ve got 80 percent of the 1st balloon system, named Speedball-1, ready and about 50 percent of Speedball-2 ready to go. The remaining work is mostly to develop the software and hardware interface with Delorme and the Iridium Satellite Network, and recruit our massive mission control operations team. So we’re ramping up all the ground systems, testing them out, finding the caretakers for them, looking for team champions to rally makers to go through the systems checkouts, and preparing for the big mission simulations that will come later this month.
We also launched a test flight (named Spitball-1) this year, flying out of SpacePort Indiana in the pouring rain. The balloon recorded second-by-second helium pressure measurements as it climbed to 28,000 ft and burst open as planned. It was a very fun thing to finally launch a balloon with this team!
Any unexpected results arise from your initial analysis?
Yes, we expected to see a steady rise in the internal pressure and then a drop once the balloon burst. However, the pressure rose and fell twice. We very carefully put together a lot of different data sources and videos in order to understand what happened. During the flight, the balloon rose and the pressure also rose as expected. Then severe turbulence caused the overflow valve to pop open resulting in the first drop in pressure. When the valve closed, the rise in pressure resumed. Finally, when the balloon burst, we saw the expected drop in pressure.
The purpose of the test flight was to empirically determine the burst pressure so that we could construct a properly calibrated mechanical helium overflow valve for our Speedball-1 inaugural flight. At first it appeared that we might have to launch additional test flights, but it looks like we now know the burst pressure is approximately 600 Pascals. Because the flights are expensive in terms of materials and time, we have to make each one count and collect as much data as we can.
Why is the balloon launched from Space Port, Indiana when the team is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky?
There are a variety of reasons. The partnership with Space Port eases our FAA interactions and frees up our ability to launch on demand with Praxair company donated helium. In addition, the Louisville Metro government prohibits the release of rubber or plastic balloons because they can go all the way to the ocean and harm marine life. We would have liked to use a biodegradeable balloon, but no bioplastic companies would return any of our many requests for information from them, and we ran out of time to do the extensive materials testing that would be needed to change balloon types. Hopefully these flights will raise awareness of the need for such materials to be made available to amateurs.
–Grace Simrall
Bio:
Project Leader, White Star Balloon team.
Project leader, SNOX: record holder of farthest amateur, small-class, trans-atlantic baloon flight.
Title:
Research and Development Manager at iKeyless
Age:
31
Location:
Louisville, KY
Contact:
@steamfire,
@LVL1WhiteStar
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