UMaine students to live stream eclipse using high-altitude balloons, media report
The Boston Globe, WSB-TV (Channel 2 in Atlanta), NECN, WABI (Channel 5), WVII (Channel 7), WMTW8 , Bangor Daily News, The Free Press, Washington Post, and Pickens County Courier of South Carolina and reported University of Maine researchers and students from the school’s High Altitude Ballooning group will travel to Clemson, South Carolina to launch specialized balloons, equipped with multiple cameras, to live stream aerial footage of the total solar eclipse to NASA’s website.The UMaine group is part of the Eclipse Ballooning Project, a NASA-funded initiative that includes students and researchers from 54 similar teams nationwide, The Boston Globe reported. On the day of the eclipse, each participating group will release its balloons from different points within the path of totality, the article states. According to Rick Eason, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMaine, the cameras on the balloons will give viewers a unique vantage point from the edge of space, in real time. “It’s just another perspective of totality, and what it looks like from around 100,000 feet,” said Eason, who is helping lead the UMaine students in the project. “It’s something that’s fun to see.” The students have been conducting test launches all summer, including a final launch Aug. 14 in Pittsfield, Maine. “This is awesome,” Cameron Sullivan, a sophomore computer engineering major, told WABI. “We’ve been working all summer trying to get this live video going. We’ve been working with the electronics, the mechanical parts trying to get the payload boxes ready. We’ve been doing launches trying to get ready.” “Everything is pretty much in order,” Eason told the Globe. “I hope we will pull it off.” NBC Boston and WLBZ (Channel 2) carried the NECN report, and Maine Public published the BDN article. Clemson University also published a news release about the launch.