In 2017, Edmund Nowak, a physics professor at the University of Delaware, drove to South Carolina to see the total solar eclipse. He had a great experience with thousands of other people all camped out for the minutes when the moon completely covered the sun.

“The whole crowd is going ‘ooh’ … and then suddenly it becomes really quiet as everybody just lets that eclipse moment, that totality moment … soak in.”

Aside from the spectacle of the eclipse itself, he was also struck by a team of students working frantically to inflate and launch weather balloons with scientific instruments.

“It’s like the Super Bowl, right? There’s lots of preparation and then the day of the event is there and you got to have that team in place and everybody working together. So I thought, ‘Wow, this would be great to bring back to to our campus.'”

And that’s what he did — he formed a team at the University of Delaware ahead of this year’s total solar eclipse. They got a grant to join a nationwide eclipse ballooning project supported by NASA. On the day of the eclipse on April 8, the team will be in Junction, Texas, which is along the path of totality.

It was not hard to find interested students to join the expedition, like Jarrod Bieber, a sophomore studying physics and astrophysics.

“I would have probably joined any project that gave me the opportunity to actually travel to the line of totality … for this April eclipse,” Bieber said.

The research team will launch balloons with instruments to study gravity waves in the atmosphere, which affect the weather but have been difficult for weather forecasters to pin down. They will also measure the levels of muons, tiny particles that come from cosmic rays and are part of the building blocks of the universe.