Project Rat
ROBERT E. BURR, a Dartmouth freshman from Winchester, Mass., has set his sights high — about 80,000 feet high, to be exact.
Burr and eight friends have spent the past year working on a project to carry a rat 80,000 feet into the atmosphere with a balloon in order to obtain information about physiology, physics, and meteorology. They plan to launch their balloon sometime between the first week in April and the second week in May, depending upon weather conditions.
The project was originally conceived while all the boys were students at Phillips Exeter Academy. Four of them are still there and the others are at various Eastern colleges. They have managed to conduct their research and make their plans despite the distances now separating them.
Burr is the director, and assisting him are Frank Holt, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Thomas Fitzpatrick, at Exeter.
Originally dubbed Project Mouse, the project now calls for a rat to be taken up in a 40-pound package for an eighthour flight and brought down — hopefully in a live recovery — by means of a pre-set timer. The package will include some $600 worth of equipment designed to measure such data as the rat's blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiratory volume and rate; the humidity, pressure and temperature inside and outside the capsule, and the radiation in the atmosphere.
The launch is planned to be held at West Newbury, Mass., and two tracking stations, as well as a plane, will follow the flight of the balloon in order to facilitate a quick recovery. In the event that the pre-set timer doesn't release the package from the balloon, there will be two alternate systems for bringing it down.
The students have received assistance from several sources, including a $600 grant from the National Institutes of Health and additional funds from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. They are being advised by Millett G. Morgan, Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Thayer School's Radiophysics Laboratory, and Dr. S. Marsh Tenney '44, chairman of the Dartmouth Medical School's Physiology Department.
They have received provisional clearance from the Federal Aviation Agency for the balloon flight, and have conferred with Prof. Alvin H. Howell, chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tufts University, who has had extensive experience flying balloonborne instruments.
Professor Morgan praised the project as a means of providing both practical experience and intellectual stimulation and motivation for the students.
Burr, the only Dartmouth student involved in the project, is an engineering science major.
