Montana State NASA team headed to Europe for total solar eclipse

BOZEMAN - At the invitation of NASA, a team of seven Montana State University students will travel to Spain this summer to fly stratospheric balloons while conducting sophisticated experiments during a total solar eclipse.

This is the sixth time that MSU's Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project members will lead student teams from American universities as they investigate eclipse-driven phenomena and share images taken from the edge of space.

On Aug. 12, the MSU students will experience the total eclipse from Borgas, Spain, where they will conduct engineering flights along with teams from the University of North Florida and the universities of Bridgeport and Hartford in Connecticut. Each team will fly two balloons which, like weather balloons, rise to altitudes where the darkness of space and curvature of Earth are visible. The six craft will carry differing payloads of up to 13 pounds of scientific equipment needed for a variety of experiments, including some designed by local Spanish students. Among other investigations, the teams will measure changes in the concentration of atmospheric ozone during the eclipse and monitor the eclipse's effects on radio communications. A long-range radio communications device called LoRa, designed by students at MSU, will be employed for the latter experiment.

"LoRa can communicate where the payload is and also send us great information about what's going on with radio signals as things change in the atmosphere with the darkening from the eclipse," said Angela Des Jardins, director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium and associate research professor in the Department of Physics in MSU's College of Letters and Science. "So, it's a little bit communications, a little bit science, and it also pushes the bounds on what that technology can do and shows us how far we can possibly transmit a good signal with that system."

The eclipse's path of totality, where the moon will completely obscure the sun when viewed from Earth, will begin in northeastern Siberia around sunrise and then pass over Greenland before arriving at the western edge of Iceland. There, near the city of Reykjavik, NEBP atmospheric science teams from the University of Idaho and University of Kentucky will fly balloons equipped with radiosondes to record and transmit temperature, pressure, humidity and wind data. The teams will work with scientists from the University of Iceland to record the eclipse's effects in the tropopause between the lower layer of Earth's atmosphere and the stratosphere. Des Jardins said the findings will help scientists better understand the atmosphere in general, which can lead to better weather predictions and climate models.

Between them, the two teams in Iceland will fly 80 small balloons beginning 18 hours before and continuing eight hours after the eclipse. They will conduct more frequent flights during sunrise, sunset and the eclipse itself, which will occur in the mid-afternoon local time.

The path of totality then will traverse the Atlantic Ocean to northern Spain, where it will arrive a little before sunset. After launching balloons toward their destination altitude - 90,000 to 120,000 feet - the student engineering teams will direct on-board equipment from the ground to gather data and capture video and still images of the moon's shadow on Earth from the near-space perspective. After the flights end, the payloads will parachute to the ground in darkness, and the students will follow beacon signals to recover them the next day.

NEBP, which is sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation, was founded at MSU in 2014 by Des Jardins to provide an opportunity for university and high school students to engage in advanced engineering and atmospheric science experiments during the 2017 total solar eclipse in the U.S. The success of the program led to subsequent student missions for eclipses in Chile in 2019 and 2020, the southwestern United States in 2023 and portions of the southern and eastern U.S. in 2024. Scientific findings from some NEBP missions have been published in prestigious journals and presented at scientific conferences.

"We have this opportunity to be part of NASA's presence for the eclipse in Europe because our great project came to mind when they were thinking about doing science for eclipses," Des Jardins said. "This is something our students will never forget."