Director says first night flight in Montana State ballooning program’s history yields valuable learning opportunities

BOZEMAN - It had been a long week for Gino Cicerone and Jasmine Hruska leading up to the launch of the first night flight in the history of stratospheric ballooning at Montana State University.

The two student apprentices in the Montana Space Grant Consortium BOREALIS program spent days preparing new technologies to test during deployment of a high-altitude balloon, which was slated to travel to the edge of space carrying those instruments and other items before a parachute gently returned the payload to Earth a few hours later.

Cicerone, a senior majoring in industrial technology in the Department of Agricultural Technology Education in the College of Agriculture, fitted the craft with a beacon visible from a distance of 3 miles, but that wasn't his primary focus in the days leading up to the Oct. 24 launch.

"For this project specifically, I've been working on a data logger that saves GPS data - it's LoRa technology, which stands for long radio," he said. "I want to phase out our current (balloon) tracking system. The one we use is very good, but it needs to interface with our website. Our final goal is to replace that."

Meanwhile, Hruska, a senior majoring in computer science in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, spent much of the week coding a new "Marco Polo" system for the LoRa, designed to help locate the payload after its return to Earth. Just two hours prior to launch, she discovered that the "Polo" board was not receiving communications. After troubleshooting, the team realized the sensors had been broken by a mechanism on the 3D-printed case created to carry the board.

"We were able to fix it, but you wouldn't think to do that test ahead of time - there's all sorts of little challenges to overcome," said Hruska, who said what she has learned about electrical engineering in the BOREALIS lab has led her to reconsider her career goals.

"It has informed how I approach things," she said. "If you had asked me what I wanted to do a few months ago, I would have said software development, but I might continue with this stuff. I like the interface with software and hardware and feel like I'm finding my niche."

Once the sensor hiccup was resolved, 17 members of the ballooning program ranging from freshmen to graduate students gathered at MSU's Dyche Field to help with what Mike Walach, flight director for the Montana Space Grant Consortium, described as a "textbook" sunset launch. As the beacon flashed and payload elements dangled from paracord beneath the rising balloon, the group returned to the space grant lab to monitor the balloon's progress via computer. Primary mission goals included testing the new LoRa technology, capturing photographs of the night sky from near-space and evaluating the performance of all existing systems during a night flight.

The BOREALIS academic ballooning program attracts students from a variety of majors who work together to conceive, design and build payloads that are flown via balloons as high as 100,000 feet - the edge of space. Several years ago, Angela Des Jardins, MSGC director and an associate research professor in the Department of Physics in MSU's College of Letters and Science, founded a related, nationwide program led by MSU for students to conduct high-level science experiments from balloons during solar eclipses. Last academic year, the MSU team launched balloons during two North American eclipses; this year, members of the BOREALIS team are preparing equipment that will ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station in 2025.

Student teams in both programs have continually developed innovations to flight systems, including a heated helium-venting system to enable ground teams to steer a balloon by directing it to different wind layers, a parachute-packing system designed to prevent tangling, and a system to cut the balloon free of the payload should the ground crew lose control of it during flight.

But, despite having flown in different types of weather and during eclipses, the BOREALIS program had never launched a flight at sunset.

"We're flying at night, so it will be way colder," said Walach, also an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Technology Education, just before launch. "This will be an extreme hardness test for all of the systems we fly."

The flight plan called for the balloon to head east from Bozeman while gaining 5 meters of altitude per second until it reached the edge of space, then travel over the northern edge of the Beartooth mountains toward Bridger before being steered toward Laurel for a soft landing.

Within an hour of launch, it became clear that things weren't going according to plan.

First, the balloon gained altitude faster than planned, so it was necessary to vent some helium to prevent it from bursting. Walach sent a command to the venting system when the balloon reached about 62,000 feet, and the team received confirmation that the message was received - however, the vent didn't open. The balloon burst at just above 86,000 feet.

Meanwhile, no data were being received from the experimental LoRa system.

"It's kind of tragic, but that's how it goes," said Cicerone, who was also a member of the 2023-2024 eclipse ballooning team.

The team knew the parachute had opened, but the signal from the tracking system was lost at 40,000 feet. The crew received a final signal from 30,000 feet but nothing more.

The next morning, Walach received a call from a rancher in Bridger who - thanks to Cicerone's beacon - had seen the payload land in a nearby field. The team recovered the parachute, beacon and the original locator system, but discovered the paracord line had snapped and half the payload was missing.

Based on two GPS pings sent from the missing portion - two cameras, the flight computer and the LoRa system - Walach believes it crashed in the Beartooths. Students and Walach hiked in to search but did not find it, and Walach said it's too dangerous to keep looking because snow has fallen on the slopes of the canyon where it probably landed. Though it's unlikely any equipment survived the freefall, he hopes the SD card and some flight data can be recovered next summer.

Walach believes the shock of the parachute opening, combined with temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, were to blame for multiple issues. He said it's the first payload lost in his four years with the program, so "it burns a little," but that he and the student team will learn much from the experience.

"These are all problems for us to study and learn from," he said. "Now we need to study this flight, examine the hardware we got back and engineer solutions to be better next time."