I launched a payload to the stratosphere to measure algae fluorescence
Hi! I’m Andrew. I’m a teenager in high school, and I’ve been programming for the past six years, and have loved computers since. I historically have only programmed, and my first public website was SparkShell, a web development platform aimed at making coding easier for teens.
Last year, I got the chance to turn my passion for electronics into something physical - sending a self-designed payload, StratoSpore, to the edge of space, reaching over 100,000 feet, to study how algae reacts to the stratosphere. I was scrolling Instagram Reels last year when I saw something: Design a PCB, and they’d get you the funds. This is where I found Hack Club, a community full of incredibly smart teenagers from all over the world making cool stuff. My time in Hack Club has been truly amazing thus far, and I’m so glad I got involved in it. However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about.
Apex
Earlier this year (March 2025,) a program was announced called Apex. The premise was simple: design a high altitude balloon payload, and they’d fund your project and fly you out to Boston so you could launch it. This pretty much immediately caught my eye. Hack Club typically runs software development focused programs, and I was excited that I might be able to put to practice the electronics skills I had been practicing.
I hadn’t ever done something like this, so I initially had a hard time coming up with ideas of what sort of project I could make. I knew I wanted to do something biology related. Maybe something about how bacteria reacts in low temperatures? I ended up on another idea.
My project (StratoSpore)
I was looking around for ideas one day when I stumbled upon a science project most high schools do. It’s called bloody chlorophyll, where you get to extract the chlorophyll from leaves, and see a cool effect. A really interesting phenomena happens when you shine black/blue light on it: it glows a vibrant red color, from an otherwise green plant slurry. I tried this out. I ground some leaves from a flower in my house, and extracted the chlorophyll by using isopropyl alcohol and heat. This was the result:
Sort of hard to see in the picture, but it looks really cool in person.
I thought this was really interesting, and though it would be interesting to pursue it further. As grinding up lettuce and extracting chlorophyll would kill it, I wanted to try another idea. Could I use algae from the lake in my town as a source of detectable fluorescence? The plan was this: have a test tube of algae on the payload, with an AS7263 spectral sensor attached to it, detecting light in the range of ~680nm. The idea is that the intense UV light and cold at those altitudes would stress the algae, causing a change in fluorescence. Also on the payload would be a Neo 6M GPS module, for detecting altitude and location. My hypothesis was that given a rise in altitude and changes of light, the fluorescence would correlate with altitude. Sort of a “biological sensor.”
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