UNF team selected by NASA to conduct solar eclipse research in Spain

A team of University of North Florida students and faculty will travel to Burgos, Spain, this week to collect scientific data during the solar eclipse as part of a NASA-supported research initiative.

NASA's Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NASA-NEBP) selected and funded the UNF team as one of only three universities to participate in the international eclipse mission. The selection builds upon several years of successful collaboration with UNF and NASA-NERB. Additional scholarship support was provided by the Florida Space Grant Consortium.

The UNF team is led by physics faculty Dr. Nirmal Patel and electrical engineering assistant professor Dr. Hemani Kaushal. Students on the team are electrical engineering majors Jorge Meza, Curren O'Brian, Henry Chea, and Stella Bewntley and mechanical engineering majors Aren Bronton, Yechiel Bulman, and Amy Pagurko.

The team collaborated with Dr. José Francisco Romero García and students from Colegio Retamar in Madrid, Spain. The Spanish students will assist the UNF team in launching and recovering the balloons. The mayor of Melgar de Yuso, Burgos, has also expressed his support for the project and looks forward to welcoming the group to Burgos.

They will launch the high-altitude balloon and fly the UNF Osprey payload at approximately 120,000 ft in the stratosphere above Spain to track and study the solar eclipse phenomena. The UNF team designed and built several research payloads that will measure changes in atmospheric conditions, including temperature, humidity, pressure, dew point and ozone concentration. The instruments will also gather data on energetic particles, radiation levels, radio communications and capture images of the moon's shadow moving across Earth during totality.

To prepare for the mission, the team tested the hardware and software on the payloads from a tethered balloon launch on UNF's campus and completed actual launches from Live Oak, Florida.

UNF's strong NASA partnership

UNF has developed a strong data collection relationship with NASA. Patel's ozone sensor payload has been selected and launched by the NASA-High Altitude Student Payload project every year since 2008. Kaushal has also developed a long-range communication system (LoRa) that will be launched by NASA this September along with a second UNF payload named the Osprey Ozone Sensor.

The UNF team was selected to participate in NASA-NEBP data collection during the annular solar eclipses of 2023 and the total solar eclipses of 2024. UNF was one of 50 universities across the United States and one of only three in Florida chosen for this project. The project provided two-year scholarships to six students.

In 2025, UNF was again selected as one of eight universities for the NASA-NEBP Solar Max Project and seven students were awarded fellowships. Later that year, UNF was chosen for the Design of Nanosatellites project, funded by NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Six students received scholarships, including three internships at the AFRL during the summer.