Balloon Fest Team Ballair Andrew, John, Valerie, Bailey, Kindsay

Beep! Our balloon has an equipped radiation monitor, Geiger counter, in the gondola. We are trying to measure radiation from all directions as we increase in altitude. What is it?

When a particle enters the Geiger counter, the information is sent through a cord to the TI-83 calculator we also have on board. This records the count, and averages them over a given period of time, and even graphs the data for us! (The median between these two devices is the LabPro…) What’s it Do?

What will happen? We believe that the radiation will increase with altitude. Test: Before when we did our test we were only able to move up 60 meters so the radiation was not very high. We noticed that there was a slight change in radiation as we increased in altitude.

Conclusion Our hypothesis was wrong. There was more altitude on the ground than in the sky. However we learned that if we were able to go much higher than 1000 feet we would have seen more of a difference in our data. Thank you to everyone who helped us succeed in getting succ essful tests.

Logger Pro Graph