FAU team launches weather balloon from small town in Manatee County to see effects of cosmic, solar radiation

DUETTE - If you were in the small town of Duette in Manatee County on Tuesday, you might have thought the road to space runs right through town. 

It’s an area known for farming, but some farmers of a different kind came visiting. They carried two white and orange boxes that might have contained the seeds of farming in space.

"In a hundred years we will have farms on the Moon and Mars and will be able to grow plants on any spacecraft you can think of," says Jake Pearman, leader of a team of students from Florida Atlantic University. 

While FAU’s basketball team was looking for a national championship, Pearman and his team were looking for Duette. 

"I learned of Duette like two days ago," says Pearman. "The fire department, give credit to them. "

The field behind the Duette-Fire Rescue was the perfect place to launch a large weather balloon to carry the white and orange boxes 112,000 feet into the air. They want to see the effects of cosmic and solar radiation on plants. 

Duette was a spot on the map where their calculations indicated the balloon could fly high enough and long enough to land in the Port St. Lucie where they would retrieve the data. Members of the team are all aerospace enthusiasts who would like careers in the space industry. 

Ana-Maria Briscon, 18, wants to be an astronautical engineer. 

"That’s basically an engineer in the aerospace field," she says. "They work on things that go out of earth’s atmosphere like cube sats and spaceships."

Launching a balloon is a step along the way. The team was careful to notify the FAA so that the balloon isn’t mistaken for a threat. Team members are well aware of the Chinese balloon scare a few weeks ago, and they’re not taking any chances.

The weather balloon lifted off over the fire station and into the blue Florida sky in a place where no man or woman on this team had gone before: Duette.