Six months, seventy students from Classes III to VII and bucketloads of scientific temperament — that's all it takes to assemble a high-altitude balloon satellite that can get us answers to anything from how toothpaste behaves in space to gathering pollution data 100 km from sea level.
 
Students from Classes III to VII of Chaman Bhartiya School, Bengaluru, are developing payloads that will travel aboard the aforementioned balloon into low-Earth orbit to conduct several experiments, including collecting data on pollution and radiation, for which they will develop sensors and cameras. Also on board will be a GPS module, a plant and toothpaste. After all, we're all curious to know what becomes of that tube in vacuum now, aren't we?
 
The students working on the project are confident that it will be launched in January 2022. They first embarked on it in August this year. The payload will be launched at an altitude of 100 km above sea level from Hosakote, a town in rural Bengaluru, once it earns clearance from the Air Traffic Control authorities.

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Shashank Mane, Facilitator at the Centre of Excellence, Chaman Bhartiya School, shared that a test launch has been completed already for the project which was born in collaboration with Bengaluru-based edu-space start-up, Genex Space. Mane said that Space Education and Robotics are a compulsory component of the curriculum at the school.