N.B. student sends weather balloon, cameras 30 kms into stratosphere
Balloon returns with stunning images and video footage
Jagriti Luitel has always had a soaring ambition, but the pandemic has quite literally elevated it to new heights.
Luitel, a mechanical engineering student at the University of New Brunswick, recently launched a high-altitude weather balloon and three GoPro cameras into near space to take photos and record video as a personal project.
The balloon soared more than 30 kilometres into the stratosphere and came back with more than 10 hours of stunning images and video footage.
The idea first occurred to Luitel after she graduated from high school in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was months old at the time, social events were at a standstill and a long, torpid summer yawned ahead of her.
"I was just sitting on my couch one day, and I stumbled across this random video of somebody launching GoPros to the edge of space," Luitel said.
The idea intrigued her. "I was like 'I will make this happen, by myself, alone.' "
She tried her hand at the project that summer, but legal and funding challenges quickly sidelined it.
Then her first year of mechanical engineering studies began, and Luitel dove into a heavy workload and online studies.
But the idea stayed with her. Hovering in the back of her mind. Waiting.
Longing for a sense of purpose
Luitel loved her studies, but with no in-person labs and no social interaction with classmates, she constantly struggled to find a sense of purpose and worried that her education was being compromised.
I was doing my calculus homework and the insignificance of my existence was overpowering. I was feeling like I needed to do something meaningful.- Jagriti Luitel
The feelings came to a head one evening while she was studying.
"I was doing my calculus homework and the insignificance of my existence was overpowering," she said. "I was feeling like I needed to do something meaningful."
She thought back to times she had felt inspired, and one clear memory struck her.
"It was of me looking at that video of the GoPros" being launched into space, she said.
"I felt I didn't have a choice, really. I knew I had to do this project."
Daunting challenges met with determination
The challenges she had faced earlier quickly reasserted themselves.
But this time, Luitel was ready for them.
She tackled the project's daunting scope by recruiting teammates with an interest in aerospace, engineering students Ryan Whitney and John Estafanos.
She wrestled its prohibitive cost by making a budget and seeking out funding, eventually receiving a grant from the UNB Engineering Undergraduate Society's engineering endowment fund.
And she covered off on safety and legal implications by delegating that task to a teammate with more familiarity with them than she had.
"That is how seemingly impossible feats are undertaken," Luitel said in a post on her blog, jagritiluitel.com. "One step at a time. Solving one issue at a time."
The team of three, led by Luitel, first met in late November 2020 and continued to meet for eight months to hammer out technical details, legal rules, social media strategies and funding applications.
Finally, on July 20 of this year, launch day arrived.
The team met in Henry Park in Fredericton's north side and, cheered on by a small group of friends and family, sent the balloon and its payload on its way.
A passion for climate change, female empowerment
In addition to GoPros and a GPS system, the balloon carried some less tangible precious cargo: Luitel's passion for the issues of female empowerment and climate change.
She had her heart set on capturing an image that somehow embodied a climate change message, and had contacted the New Brunswick Environmental Network to see if it would be interested in having its logo attached to the mission.
The network agreed, and Luitel handpainted the logo herself, affixing it to arms on the balloon.
The resulting photo of the logo highlighted against the curvature of the Earth is her favourite of all the images captured during the balloon's voyage.
That visual was "literally on my mind throughout the whole project," she said. "I was like, I want this picture.
"It's a symbolic thing: the youth of New Brunswick care about climate change and we wanted to show that."
The mission also presented multiple opportunities to showcase the importance of female leadership, particularly in the typically male-dominated STEM — or science, technology, engineering and mathematics — fields of study.
"I feel like leadership in this world is very masculine energy," Luitel said. "What does the female lead look like? I really wanted to explore that within myself, explore what I'm capable of … so I included that in our mission objective: to inspire girls in STEM to take up leadership positions."
In a perhaps-not-coincidental coincidence on launch day, Luitel got a chance to deliver that message in person.
"Right after our launch, two little girls came running to me and asked, 'Hey, what is this?'
"I literally explained the whole thing to them. I was like 'You guys should do engineering and get into science,' " she said with a laugh. "I had this whole spiel."
Balloon's journey to near space and back
The balloon soared 103,000 feet into the stratosphere, capturing hours of stunning footage on its 2½-hour journey before bursting and falling back to Earth.
The GPS system had stopped transmitting, so Luitel and her teammates headed out to search for the downed balloon using flight predictor software.
After driving for hours with no luck, the team declared the project a failure and headed home.
"We were devastated," Luitel said.
Then suddenly, her phone pinged. It was a text message.
A couple canoeing on Grand Lake had found the payload, complete with the waterproof contact information card Luitel had attached to it.
In her blog, Luitel said she only realized afterward how close they'd come to never seeing their balloon again.
"We later saw in the footage that water was starting to slowly seep into the payload, meaning if the timing was even a little bit off, it could easily have drowned," she wrote. "Miracles. Miracles. Miracles. That is all I could think of."
Luitel has now had several weeks to relax and bask in the glory of her successful mission, but her ambition isn't taking a break.
She's busy with her summer job as a research assistant at CubeSat NB, the first satellite New Brunswick will launch from the International Space Station in 2022.
She's also thinking ahead to September, when she'll enter her second year of studies, and beyond.
"I want to learn as much as possible and I want to work in the aerospace field," Luitel said. "And I'd love to go to space one day. That is my ultimate goal in life."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
