A group of St. Albert students had a happy ending to their space adventures this week thanks to a man in a mine.
The St. Albert Balloon Launch Experiment (SABLE) team at Sir George Simpson Junior High was all smiles this week after they got their first look at footage from their space probe. The probe, a camera-equipped pink box attached to a weather balloon, was launched in St. Albert on June 25 to capture pictures and video of Earth's upper atmosphere.
But the team would never have found the probe had it not been for a sharp-eyed worker at a coalmine near Wabamun Lake, says Tony Rafaat, the team's teacher-advisor.
"He was only moments away from crushing it," Rafaat said.
SABLE soars again
This was the fifth SABLE experiment, Rafaat said, and the second in St. Albert. The experiment gives kids hands-on experience with science, and has them build, launch and retrieve a container that can survive a fall from the beginnings of outer space, hopefully bringing back pictures in the process.
Last year's launch carried a digital camera to 33,594 metres above sea level and returned with shots of space. This year, Rafaat says, the team also included a video camera and two wooden rods to act as stabilizers for the container.
Grade 8 student Braeden Durand says he joined the 10-person team on the advice of friends.
"The video is amazing," he said.
The launch itself happened on June 25 at 7:40 a.m., Rafaat says. Video footage shows the probe soaring up and away from the school, capturing a panoramic view of St. Albert. The probe's camera picked up the creaks of what were presumably the balloon's strings and the howl of the wind, interspersed with the occasional beep from the digital camera.
Panic struck when the team lost the probe's signal at about 3,000 metres, Durand said.
"We were thinking, 'Oh my God, something just happened to our balloon' … That's when we started freaking out."
It turned out to be a glitch in the probe's GPS tracker — it started signalling again when it dropped below 3,000 metres during its descent.
They can't be sure since the signal cut out, Rafaat said, but the team believes the balloon reached a peak altitude of about 35,000 metres.
"As it gets higher and higher, you see more of the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space," he said, adding that it becomes very quiet as the probe enters near-vacuum conditions.
At about 9:55 a.m., the probe's camera recorded a very faint "thump" followed by a spaghetti-like rain of rubber from the burst balloon. The probe then began its long, tumbling descent back to Earth.
The team tracked the probe's signal to somewhere in an open-pit coal mine near Wabamun Lake — a hilly place where its directional radio signal was almost impossible to find.
"We were a little bit worried that we'd never get it back," Durand said.
After a long, fruitless search, the team packed it in for the day.
Strange pink box
That would have been the end of it had not Rafaat got a call from Randy Tucker on June 28.
"His first words over the phone were, 'Do you like to chase balloons?'" Rafaat says.
Tucker, who works for TransAlta's reclamation division, says he was moving rock with a track hoe when he spotted a strange pink box.
"At first I thought that it was some garbage that had blown over," he said.
When he took a closer look, he saw the SABLE logo and Rafaat's phone number on it. He said he probably would have crushed the probe with his next shovel-load.
Durand said he jumped for joy when he learned the probe had been found.
"We were so excited to find out that we finally had our balloon back," he said.
SABLE-5's flight can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm7UYh89EIs.
