A record has been broken at EOL's recent sub-orbital space weather balloon launch.

The launch, which involved students from Otumoetai and Mount Maunganui colleges, saw two balloons being released from a site near Ohaupo.

Of the two balloons only one was retrieved from land, at a bushy site near Te Puke, with the other landing about a kilometre off Pukehina beach.

EOL technical director Terry Coles says a New Zealand record has been achieved in the launch.

'From previous records we can see the current record for launches of this type, sits between 17 and 20km. These are usually weather balloons which have been launched by MetService.

'The launch we did on June 22 got to 35.3km high.”

Tony says the current US record is 37km.

'So we weren't too short of that.”

He says the team was fairly confident the new record was achievable at the time of the launch, however they also knew water was an issue.

'We did a second launch that day, which actually went a little higher but it landed in the sea, and because of that we couldn't recover the data. We don't know what altitude it went but we know it went higher.

'The difficulty of doing this in New Zealand is that our country is quite narrow, so if you go to high you end up landing in the sea – so we have to get the wind going in the right direction.”

The Ohaupo launch was also attended by a group of visiting American students.

'They left half their team behind in the United States who did a simultaneous launch, so we're waiting to hear back on the results of that.

'Their launch site was 38° latitude north and our launch site was 38° latitude south. So we were both equal distances from the equator just in different hemispheres.

'On both flights we had radiation sensors, so we're waiting to hear whether the radiation is at the same latitude in the northern hemisphere as it is in the south. We expect it will be.”