SABLE soars the heavens

It's May 29. You're about 34 kilometres above Alberta. Before you: the thin blue haze of the atmosphere. Below: white clouds. Above: black space. It's cold — about 50 below — and silent.

A white balloon the size of a house rises before you. Strung beneath it is a small pink box with the words "SABLE-4" on it, plus a red and black parachute. In the box are sensors, a camera and a poem.

The balloon strains to contain the pressure within. It hangs for a moment at 110,216 feet, drops a bit, then ascends once more.

Then, at 9:55 a.m., with barely a sound, it explodes in a burst of rubber and helium. The box falls …

And the chase begins.

The balloonists

It's 6:30 a.m. In a garage at St. Albert's Sir George Simpson Junior High School, 16 students watch as a weather balloon takes shape. Each wears a red shirt with words written in black: "It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's SABLE-4!"

They are here to take part in the St. Albert Balloon Launch Experiment (SABLE), the fourth in a series of balloon experiments organized by local teacher Tony Rafaat. They've been working on it since the fall; today is launch day.

"We are launching a high-altitude balloon into the stratosphere to take pictures of space," explains Kaitlyn Hunder, one of the students who built the payload container. The box contains sensors to detect atmospheric conditions that will be transmitted back to Earth, along with a GPS transponder. It also holds a camera set to take one shot a minute and a poem, penned by Hunder, describing their work. "We all signed it so we can say it went up to 100,000 feet."

The students had to make the box, parachute and shirts, Rafaat says, and learn about weather, physics and radio for the launch. "This is a great opportunity to see kids go and try something new."

The shot seen ‘round the world

As Rafaat and the students fill the balloon with helium, James Ewen of the BEAR team goes over the details of the mission.

The Balloon Experiments in Amateur Radio (BEAR) team started in 2000, Ewen says. He and some other local radio fans heard of a group that launched a balloon in B.C., and wanted to try it themselves.

They launched and retrieved BEAR-1 that May 27, sending a small Winnie the Pooh doll skyward in a hexagonal capsule. Another launch followed that August. "Ever seen a dog chase a ball over and over again?" jokes BEAR member Garrett Sloan. "We send a balloon up and go chase it!"

Rafaat, then a teacher in Hanna, says he'd heard about an American who'd hooked a camera with a weather balloon and wanted his students to give it a shot. Stumbling across the BEAR site, he teamed up with them and launched SABLE-1 on May 20, 2006.

It didn't work.

"We didn't have enough helium and it got caught in a tree," Rafaat says, crashing after just seven minutes. SABLE-2 took off, but was never found due to a glitch in its tracker.

SABLE-3 captured a perfect shot of the Earth from 117,597 feet (about four times the height of Mount Everest) on Aug 11, 2007. The BEAR team celebrated and put the picture on their website.

It became the shot seen 'round the world. After it was spotted by someone at the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles, it was soon forwarded to popular websites such as Gizmodo, Digg and Slashdot, drawing tens of thousands of hits in 24 hours. "It just kind of went viral," Ewen says.

Interview requests rolled in from the CBC, Globe and Mail, London and Hong Kong. Rafaat went on The Discovery Channel. BEAR had gone big.

The launch

And so has the weather balloon. After several minutes of helium, the balloon is about six feet across and has enough lift to support the payload. The team prepares to attach the box.

The balloon gets loose. Squeals of terror follow as it hurtles towards the pointy metal ceiling: "Oh! Oh! Oh!" Rafaat grabs the string and stops it inches from the roof. Hearts start beating again.

The crew drags the balloon out of the garage, weighing it down with student Carter Buchanan. "It was hard to keep it down," he says later. "It almost felt like it would pick me off my feet."

He and the others attach the payload. The wind whips the balloon around, almost sending it into a basketball hoop. At 7:08 a.m., they let go. Within 30 seconds it is but a tiny pearl in the grey sky. It starts to rain.

The chase

The balloon climbs at about 660 feet (201 metres) a minute over the next 167 minutes, according to the BEAR team, zipping along at up 141 km/hour as it flies northwest of St. Albert.

Everyone jumps into cars to chase it. Rafaat is tense as he barrels down Highway 2 towards Legal in the driving rain. He frets about radio reception, and curses a slow-moving quad headed to the Rainmaker Rodeo. BEAR member Bob Rozycki calmly reads the balloon's telemetry over the CB as it comes in: 70,000 feet, 80,000, 90,000 …

The helium in the balloon is lighter than air, Rafaat explains, causing it to rise. The balloon grows as the atmosphere thins, reducing the pressure on it, until it's about 35 feet wide — nearly six times its original size. "We call it the bungalow balloon." Eventually, the pressure becomes too much and the balloon bursts — silently, due to near-vacuum conditions.

At least, that's what supposed to happen. The balloon peaks at 110,216 feet (about 34 kilometres up), sinks, and then rises again. Rafaat and the BEARs are flummoxed. Has it stabilized? Is it floating? Will it float to Russia?

Then, at about 9:55 a.m., SABLE-4's altitude nose-dives. It's popped. But it's falling way too fast — about 4,300 feet per minute. The chute must have tangled in the balloon, Rafaat concludes. SABLE hits the ground 26 minutes later, and they lose its tracking signal.

The team starts a painstaking search, crawling along country roads to detect SABLE's beacon. The beacon is line-of-sight and signals once a minute; it'll be a miracle if they detect it in this terrain.

Rafaat sends most of the students home. This could be SABLE-2 all over again, he and others moan — a long, arduous search, finding nothing.

A lucky break

It's three hours later. Rafaat has lost the main search group and is trying to catch up to them. Suddenly, co-pilot Brian Jackson says, "We've got a packet!"

It's a transmission from SABLE-4, complete with coordinates. Rafaat and Jackson can't believe it; it's less than a kilometre away. The other trackers verify the signal and converge.

Five hours into the mission, at about noon, the trackers locate SABLE-4 in a farmer's field west of Range Road 75 near Rochfort Bridge — about 100 kilometres northwest of St. Albert. The balloon's shredded, and the parachute and antenna are a twisted mess, but the box is barely dented. The poem, camera, and instruments are fine. The weary team takes a celebratory photo.

Chase Jeffels is the only student on site. Fortunately, he's also the cameraman and filmed everything. "I would have been disappointed if they'd found it without me," he says.

Back at the school, the team downloads the photos from the SABLE camera. They show St. Albert from above, clouds, more clouds, and, finally, the blackness of space. Mission accomplished.

Jeffels says he's glad he was a part of it. "It was a lot funner than just sitting around," he says, and he learned about science too.

That's the key to this whole exercise, Ewen says. Today's students need practical applications for their lessons, and this gives them that.

"If we can get more people with more kids excited about science, I'm after that."