A handful of students from Holy Trinity Academy are looking to the skies for their endeavour with science.

The students have built a high altitude balloon in to take part in the Global Space Balloon Challenge, an internationally recognized competition.

One of the brains behind the balloon Jotham d'Ailly says the balloon will take flight this weekend.

"It's designed to take pictures of the curvature of the earth and so to do this we built a payload with a camera and GPS and just attach it to this giant balloon that will carry it up and be taking pictures the whole time and as it gets higher it will take a better picture of the earth," he says.

d'Ailly says for a bunch of high schoolers they'll be competing with some elite company.

"There's multiple university teams like Stanford and M.I.T. people who do this as extreme hobbies put a lot of money into these events. So we're just entering it as more of a participation to get it done and to set the standard."

He says it's been quite the process for all of those behind the balloon to get it assembled.

"We only had a few times where everyone together could actually have a time to work on it so we each kind of grabbed different positions and we'd work on those separately and then come together and put it together."

d'Ailly will be attending the University of Western Ontario in the fall and hopes to continue build high altitude balloons as part of a club type atmosphere.

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