Developing cost-efficient and versatile alternative to Earth observation imaging satellites using weather balloons.
Project Stratus aims to build a multi-purpose weather balloon that can navigate itself horizontally through the stratosphere. We will achieve this by controlling the balloon’s altitude through negative feedback loops to ride on air currents that flow in different horizontal directions at different altitudes. Our final goals is to employ a machine learning model to predict wind velocities based on data collected by a set of mounted sensors and use it to create a weather balloon that can serve as a cost-efficient and versatile alternative to low orbit satellites for weather monitoring and Earth observation imagery.