Seth Bruzewski is making his first trip to Canada this weekend on a hunt to retrieve a wayward space weather balloon that unexpectedly drifted off course during a planned experiment.
The fourth-year astrophysics student at Michigan State University worked with a team from the school’s astronomy club when they launched their weather balloon Monday evening.
They expected the balloon to land in Metro Detroit, about an hour’s drive east of campus. Instead, their device ended up in Bobcaygeon, Ont., the small community located north of Peterborough popularized by the hit Tragically Hip song of the same name.
“We’re not really sure what happened. It ended up in Canada, so obviously the predictors weren’t quite accurate, but that happens,” Bruzewski said.
The president of the Michigan State University Astronomy Club has been listening to the Hip song repeatedly after hearing it for the first time on Tuesday.
Unexpected flight path
Bruzewski plans to retrieve his device this weekend with assistance from Canadians who have already helped track down the the balloon that ended up in a tree.
“It’s a good excuse to go on a road trip for my senior year, visit a beautiful area of Canada and retrieve this package and see if we got any really cool footage from it,” he said.
His team attached a video camera that they hoped would record the trip. If successful, they want to launch a second balloon next year with some scientific equipment that could record more detailed experiments.
A team from Michigan State University’s astronomy club prepares to launch a space weather balloon Monday evening. (Seth Bruzewski)
His team expected the balloon to be in the air for about three hours before slowly returning to the ground. As planned, a GPS tracker on the balloon turned off after reaching a height of about 3,000 metres.
Once the balloon popped and the device parachuted below that height, the GPS tracker would turn back on, at which point they could track it as it slowly returned to the ground.
The tracking system finally turned on after about 14 hours. That’s when Bruzewski was finally able to locate the weather balloon.
The team used atmospheric flow models to predict the best they could the expected flight path, but those rely on the atmosphere not changing too drastically, Bruzewski explained.
“The upper atmosphere can be really challenging to model. Sometimes random things do blow things way off course,” he said.
Widespread support from Canadians
To find out exactly where the balloon ended up, Bruzewski reached out to people on Reddit. He expected to find at least one or two people interested in helping him find the balloon before he made the six-hour drive to find it himself.
He made the post and went to class with his phone on silent. When he turned his phone on again after an hour, he already had more than 20 people offering to help.
Bruzewski sent the co-ordinates to a couple Canadians, who then found the balloon in a tree, about 20 metres above ground.
Since locating the balloon, one person in the Bobcaygeon area who specializes in tree climbing has volunteered to meet Bruzewski at the site.
Bruzewski says the outpouring of help has made the retrieval of the balloon much easier than expected.
“In a kind of a weird way it’s reinforced a certain stereotype that people in Canada are just amazingly helpful,” he said.