Photo/Illutration The sun shines above the Earth. The photo was taken by a camera at the bottom of the balloon. (Provided by Asahigaoka Senior High School’s astronomy club)

NAGOYA—A balloon launched by high school students soared into the stratosphere and captured our blue, round planet on cameras from an altitude of about 28 kilometers.

Members of the astronomy club of Asahigaoka Senior High School here flew the high-altitude balloon, named Kokou No. 1, on Oct. 13.

“We were extremely excited,” Masahiro Yamada, 17, the club’s leader, said about the retrieval of the cameras, sensors and other equipment the balloon had carried.

“Watching the video footage, we were struck by how round the Earth really is,” said Yamada.

The club started the Space Balloon Project in October last year to make the charms of the universe accessible to more people.

The goal was to take photographs and video footage from the stratosphere and collect data, such as temperature, atmospheric pressure and radiation levels.

The stratosphere, extending between 10 km and 50 km above the Earth’s surface, is often called the “edge of space.”

Club members designed and produced the balloon’s payload by raising about 800,000 yen ($5,200) on their own, including about 600,000 yen through crowdfunding.

The project also received support from six companies.

The orange-colored balloon was launched at 5:32 a.m. from Koijigahama beach at the tip of the Atsumi Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture. It reached an altitude of about 28 km at 6:39 a.m. before it burst.

The payload landed in waters about 20 km off Hamamatsu in the neighboring prefecture of Shizuoka at 6:54 a.m. By tracking its GPS coordinates, the students chartered a fishing boat to its location and collected it.

Yamada, a second-year student, said he could see the layer of atmosphere over the Earth in video footage because the blue color of the sky became deeper as the balloon gained altitude.

“While the jet-black universe stretched above our eyes, our town lay below,” he said. “We were able to feel human activity and the strength of life in there.”

First-year students in the astronomy club are planning a second balloon with a more unique mission.

“With our own eyes, we were able to see a world that could only be seen in textbooks,” Yamada said. “We will be happy if our project inspires children to open up new frontiers, such as outer space.”

The retrieved equipment, nine photos and other materials from the project are on display at Toyohashi Planetarium in Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture, until Dec. 28.

Video footage taken from the balloon can be viewed on YouTube at (https://youtu.be/afTwQ8AUCL0?si=mnRWVhaVJ_6AwEvn).

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