This morning the Owego Apalachin Middle School’s Blue Horizon Club launched a high-altitude balloon to capture pictures of the earth from near space. The group’s goal is for the balloon and payload to reach heights of at least 90,000 feet, roughly 17 miles high, and the flight of the balloon is being recorded with still and video cameras that they will recover using GPS. In addition to the cameras, the balloon will also include two small balloons which contain students’ “wishes from space”, wishes written by the students on paper which will scatter after the balloons burst, and hopefully spread across a wide expanse of land. The wishes are written on bio-degradable paper, but if found, an email address is written on the paper asking the finder to write and let the group know where they were when they found the paper. The group will then make a map with pinned locations of where the wishes fell.
