High School Team Secures Slot For NASA Balloon Project
Springside Chestnut Hill Academy’s (SCH) Devil Dragon Balloon team has been selected to participate in a NASA High-Altitude Student Platform (HASP). This NASA Balloon Program Office initiative offers participants the…
Springside Chestnut Hill Academy's (SCH) Devil Dragon Balloon team has been selected to participate in a NASA High-Altitude Student Platform (HASP). This NASA Balloon Program Office initiative offers participants the opportunity to launch student-designed payloads into the upper atmosphere using a giant zero-pressure balloon.
Two SCH students, Jude Hackford and Ariana Chan van der Helm, along with SCH teacher Alissa Sperling and mentor Peter Randall, will join Drexel University students in the HASP project.
The team from SCH earned one of only eight large payload slots for HASP. These payloads contain boxes of experiments. SCH's muon tomography payload, which complements the students' current investigations, is designed to simulate cosmic-ray production in the absence of an atmosphere.
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“Jude and Ariana have been leaders in this process and highly involved in all aspects of the development and engineering design,” said Sperling to The Chestnut Hill Local. SCH's achievement is notable because the HASP program is university-oriented. SCH secured this competitive opportunity after a lengthy application process, according to Sperling.
Overall, the program provides high school students with a platform to pursue long-term scientific research and engineering projects and to contribute data to their field.
Over the coming year, the team will design and test their payload, conduct smaller launches, and travel to Texas for payload integration with the HASP program. According to Sperling, NASA plans to launch the balloon from Wallops Island, Virginia, in fall 2026, with data collection and analysis to follow in the months thereafter.
“I'm looking forward to seeing something we've spent months designing fly and return data that will contribute to the field we're studying,” Hackford shared with the Chestnut Hill Local. “It's a rare opportunity for a high schooler to not only complete long-term scientific research and engineering projects, but also do so through a NASA project.”
