🇩🇪 Amon Schumann

The award

The Craig R. Barrett Award for Innovation is one of the special prizes given alongside the grand awards at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. In 2022 it was worth $10,000. The Society for Science named Schumann as its winner at the fair in Atlanta on 12 and 13 May.

His project is described as balloon-borne solar-powered instruments transmitting aerial images and climate data, capable of circumnavigating Earth for several weeks. Every element of that is an engineering constraint disguised as a sentence.

Why a weeks-long balloon is hard

A weather balloon of the conventional sort rises, bursts and falls within hours. Staying aloft for weeks means a different machine: an envelope that holds pressure without failing, mass measured in grams rather than kilograms, and a power budget that can survive every night between sunrises.

Solar power is the pivot. Instruments have to run on what the panel collects during the day and on whatever can be stored for the dark hours, at altitudes where the cold degrades batteries. Radio has to reach the ground from anywhere on the route, which usually means satellite links or amateur-radio networks rather than line of sight. Doing all of it cheaply enough to accept losing the payload is the part that separates a hobby project from an instrument.

Cost is the other constraint. A balloon that crosses oceans is a balloon that will not be recovered, so every gram of instrumentation has to be cheap enough to abandon. That single requirement rules out most professional sensor packages and forces a designer towards components built for consumer electronics rather than for meteorology.

What the data is for

A probe that circles the planet for weeks collects measurements along a path no fixed station can cover: winds and conditions in the upper atmosphere, above the ocean and across regions where ground instruments are sparse. Aerial images add a visual record to the numbers.

The award announcement does not publish the number of flights made, the instruments carried, the altitudes reached or where the data was deposited. What it establishes is that judges at the largest pre-college science fair in the world found the system innovative enough to name it in a special award.

The fair

Regeneron ISEF 2022 assembled 1,750 finalists from 49 US states and 63 countries, regions and territories at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, competing for nearly $8 million. Schumann reached it as one of the German contingent, which arrives through affiliated national competitions rather than by direct entry.

The top award, $75,000, went to Robert Sansone of Florida for a magnet-free electric motor. Abdullah Al-Ghamdi of Dammam took $50,000 for a hydrogen-storage material, and Anika Puri of New York took the $10,000 science communication prize for anti-poaching software. Maya Ajmera, the Society's chief executive, said the finalists had "shown true dedication, passion, and grit."

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the award, the amount, his age, his home city and the description of the system, from the organisation that ran the fair.

Open: his school, any German competition results, the technical specification of the balloons, and everything after May 2022. No later interview, university or project appears in the sources gathered for this page, and none is invented here to fill the space.