Montana Space Grant Leads Ballooning Initiatives for Summer 2026 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.”
Read the full article on: montana.edu
Author Credit: Diana Setterberg, MSU News Service
Image Credit: MSU photo by Kelly Gorham
Original Post Date: 3.23.36