Two students and two faculty members at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy — part of the Devil Dragon Balloon team (the Drexel University-SCH high-altitude ballooning team) — have been selected to participate in NASA’s High-Altitude Student Platform (HASP). This NASA Balloon Program Office initiative provides a unique opportunity to launch student-designed payloads into the upper atmosphere via a giant zero-pressure balloon.

The Devil Dragon Balloon team has been launching payloads (essentially, boxes of experiments) into the atmosphere for the past three years. Their latest launches occurred in November.

“We have been allocated one of only eight ‘large’ payload spaces,” said SCH teacher Alissa Sperling. “The students are studying muon tomography and have designed a payload to simulate cosmic-ray production in the absence of an atmosphere.”

Honors astrophysics research students Jude Hackford and Ariana Chan van der Helm, Sperling, and mentor Peter Randall joined Drexel undergraduate and graduate students to present the latest research and payload design process at the American Astronomical Society Winter Meeting this month.

“Jude and Ariana have been leaders in this process and highly involved in all aspects of the development and engineering design,” said Sperling, who emphasized that because the program is designed for universities, the school’s acceptance — following a lengthy application process — is an exceptional achievement.

Over the next year, they’ll work on designing the payload, testing it on smaller launches, and traveling to Texas for payload integration with the HASP program. Finally, the NASA Balloon Program Office will launch the balloon with the Devil Dragon payload from Wallops Island, Va., in fall 2026. Data will be collected and analyzed in the following months.

“This opportunity is exciting, as it allows research that is usually done at universities to be carried out at the high school level,” Hackford said. “Through HASP, our team designs a payload, tests it against real engineering constraints, and then flies it to near space on a NASA balloon. I’m looking forward to seeing something we’ve spent months designing fly and return data that will contribute to the field we’re studying. It’s a rare opportunity for a high schooler to not only complete long-term scientific research and engineering projects, but also do so through a NASA project.”