For years I have looked at those V-shaped, paper coffee filters and had a very unimaginative thought: “Mmmm – coffee!”

Lou Broad, a physics teacher at Timberlane High School in Plaistow, is more imaginative. He looked and them and thought: “Mmmm – orbital re-entry vehicle!”

Broad and his colleagues on Project SMART, a University of New Hampshire summer program for high-schoolers, used the filter’s pointed-cone shape to create a cheap and simple vehicle to fall from the edge of space without a parachute. Last month, it descended 105,000 feet (20 miles) in half an hour before landing safely in a Massachusetts yard, never spilling its electronic equipment, despite the fact it didn’t have a top.

In Project SMART, high school students, who have to apply and be accepted, gather upper-atmosphere data by sending equipment up on weather balloons. The balloons eventually burst due to low atmospheric pressure, leaving the payload to make its way to the ground.

“We don’t have enough telemetry to bring video images to the ground, so we have to recover the payload,” said Charles Smith, a physics professor at UNH’s Institute for Earth, Oceans and Space who has lots of experience working with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on spacecraft. “We did not recover the payload in 2011 and 2010.”

Video footage recovered from the 2009 flight showed that the shoebox-shaped payload tumbled, “which wrapped the parachute around the box, so in effect it never deployed,” said Smith. “Lou thought, why not design a vehicle that would naturally right itself as it came down.”

“He and students at Timberlane, during winter, tested a bunch of designs,” Smith said. Coffee filters, which drift point-down if properly weighted, were the inspiration.

The resulting capsule, if that’s the right word, was made out of pink styrofoam, packing tape, hot glue and cardboard. It hung under the weather balloon, open to the elements.

Richard Levergood, physics teacher at Londonderry High School, was among those who helped fill the device with GPS, two altimeters, pressure and temperature sensors, and a Geiger counter to measure cosmic rays. It was his first year in the program, and he says the two-week frenzy to get the device built was fun.

“A new thing this year was a line cutter. It took the altitude data and GPS data and under certain conditions, if it was drifting outside the mission box, it would activate a line cutter to release the payload. They idea was to prevent us from drifting out over the ocean,” he said.

The balloon was released in Brattleboro, Vt., after a detailed study of the jet stream. The idea was to find a moment of calm, so the balloon wouldn’t be carried too far away.

“We picked a hole in thunderstorm pattern when the jet stream was mild,” said Smith. “We had made it to 95,000 feet in other years, and we really wanted to break through 100,000.”

Levergood said it landed “in the back of a what looked like an old railroad station in Templeton, Mass. It was remarkable to walk up to it, and think ‘this is the same object that went up to 105,000 feet.’?”

The descent may have been a record. UNH called the parachute-less recovery from a six-figure altitute “a first for the small-ballooning community.”

Project SMART is one of many hands-on projects outside classroom that have been created to help teach students about science. FIRST Robotics is the best known, but plenty exist.

Levergood said the value of such projects is that even if it fails, it teaches the students that real science is more than just a final answer.

“Even if the balloon’s not recovered, or the electronics fail, they’ve still gone through very important scientific process in building and designing the system. They’ll never lose that knowledge,” he said.

Let us admit, however, that even the most ardent of scientists are human.

“It’s a lot more fun when it works,” Levergood admitted.

Granite Geek runs Mondays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com. Follow him on Twitter at @GraniteGeek.