On August 6, 2008, just after 2 o’clock in the afternoon in Sapporo, Japan, physicist Gary Morris of Valparaiso University in Indiana surrendered the 6-foot-wide, solid-white weather balloon that he had just spent over an hour calibrating and preparing for its journey through the sky. The graduate students from Hokkaido University assigned to the launch eagerly accepted the instrument, and Morris headed up to the nearby rooftop observatory to make the last-minute checks before radioing the final “Go” to the students below.
“I’ve done a lot of balloon launches, [but] it was a little more nerve-wracking being in Japan launching,” Morris admits. “I wanted things to go smoothly.”
At 2:54 p.m., the students released the balloon, which lofted peacefully into the air, rising at a rate of 5 meters per second. It was an unusually hazy day, a balmy ...
