As the sky darkened, all eyes at Arlington’s Martin High School were on the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the total solar eclipse in North Texas.
Well, not all — not entirely, anyway.
Junior Londyn Franklin was focused on the 36-inch balloons floating about 300 feet up, tracking the weather changes as the moon blocked the sun. She sometimes put her glasses on to briefly witness the eclipse as it approached totality.
“I definitely think there’s going to be a temperature change, because if you think about it, when the moon casts a shadow over the sun, you’re gonna not get as many rays coming through,” Franklin said.
Franklin, 16, partnered with a group of students in California to help NASA research potential atmospheric changes caused by a total solar eclipse — the first in North Texas since 1878.
Last summer, she was one of four high school students nationwide selected for a research position with NASA’s STEM Enhancement in Earth Science summer internship.
“She’s the only one that’s actually sending up the balloon with the instrumentation today to test it, because she’s going to have both control conditions and then eclipse conditions,” said Jason Forsythe, STEM Coordinator at Martin High School.
Franklin learned how to use balloons for science experiments during the internship. She also started conducting research, writing papers and presenting their findings. Now, she wants to transfer that knowledge to other students.
“I did not think high schoolers could conduct research,” she said. “I was like, ‘That’s a graduate student thing,’ so I want to make sure that other students also know this is available to them.”
Forsythe had Franklin as a freshman in his geography class. He witnessed her grow over the years from a timid student to a young lady seizing the moment and gaining experiences along the way, he said.
“It’s really cool just to get to watch these kids grow and become incredible adults,” he said.
About 40 minutes before totality, students and teachers surrounded Franklin to help.
Some put helium into the balloons. Some tied the balloons to the string. Some kept the balloons in the air. Franklin attached a tracking monitor to a balloon’s strings.
One balloon wasn’t buoyant enough to stay up with the monitor attached. She tried two balloons, which also failed. Three balloons did the trick.
The wind didn’t help.
Instead of flying up straight or toward the same direction of totality, the wind blew the balloons on the opposite side. It didn’t affect the experiment, but Franklin couldn’t look toward totality the entire time.
Once totality ended, Forsythe came over to help Franklin collect her balloons.
“This is neat,” he told her. “Thanks for letting me be a part of this, kid.”
Later, Franklin will come back out again to fly a balloon to establish temperatures not being affected by the eclipse.
In about three weeks, the group will calculate the exact changes in temperature and humidity during Franklin’s experiment. It takes awhile because some variables may affect data, such as if she pulled the balloon down too fast.
For now, though, Franklin thinks she mostly got what she needed.
The temperature dropped about 10 degrees during totality.
More importantly, “I was able to see the parts that I wanted to see,” she said, smiling.
Dang Le is a reporting fellow for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at dang.le@fortworthreport.org or @DangHLe. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Arlington Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.