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DIY Space Photography
Four Spanish teenagers sent a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere. The boys built the electronic sensor components from scratch. Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort attached a £56 camera to a heavy duty £43 latex balloon, and sent their science project 20-miles above the Earth. Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said, "We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible."
I'll be sure to be thinking of people putting random shit in the air.
Chrome alerted me to possibly dangerous content from creative-banners.com (or something like that) while I was browsing the article. Be forewarned!
From the article:
... [they] followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth."
"Proving that you don't need Google's billions
Maybe they did need Google's billions.
I wonder what kind of clearance this sort of balloon experiment requires. You wouldn't want to do this anywhere near air traffic routes for fear of hitting an airliner. I know the equipment is light but I imagine it'd still do some damage if it got sucked into an engine or hit a plane travelling at mach 0.85.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
We just put on our return address back in the neolithic days, when I was a kid. Mine went from Livermore to Hollister.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
"SABLE-3 was launched on Saturday, August 11th, 2007, at 9:31 AM with a payload, consisting of a Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera set to take 1 image every minute and a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS Tracker, that the Kaysam 1200 gram balloon carried to over 117,597 feet. The last payload camera photo from the ground was just before it was launched, at 9:31 AM, and the last photo before the balloon burst was the photo above, at 12:01 PM, exactly 2.5 hours or 150 images later." link - more info here
Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment did that in August 2007.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
...to pull off a stunt like that.
Here's images from a similar flight conducted by Oklahoma State university students in July last year:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arena5/sets/72157606119049987/
What is a "camera-operated weather balloon"?
The camera did not operate anything.
And is it a weather balloon if it isn't doing weather observations?
I think this is fantastic and that the guys who achieved this deserve all the (positive) attention they are getting. I wish more people thier age could get into sending stuff into space... actuially forget that last bit, we'll just end up with empty cans of lager and unsuspecting victims hanging in the sky over the UK.
Granted, this kind of thing has been done before, but that doesn't diminish the fact that this is simply a really cool project, particularly for a group of high school kids.
They have a flickr page with more photos of the balloon and the results (note that much of the captions are in Spanish). I'm impressed; in fact, I'd love to try this myself.
"Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere." ....
"the budding scientists, all aged 18-19, followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth."
wait... what?
But how do you find where it lands without some kind of GPS attached to it? (Which also costs money)
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
They sent a peep up with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygpYWzKGN6c
...to lift a 56 pound camera.
Do you have ESP?
An small nitpick... The captions are not in Spanish. Are in Catalonian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
Nuts and Volts magazine is writing about this for several years now. CO, USA.
Latest article: http://www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/magazine/issue/2009/03
Author: http://www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/magazine/contributor/l_paul_verhage
Nothing new here. Move on.
An small nitpick... The captions are not in Catalonian. Are in Catalan.
Similar idea but much cooler way of retrieving the equipment: http://www.members.shaw.ca/sonde/
Reminds me of Kite Aerial Photography . . .
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=yYl&ei=xI7BSZzrKoTM-AbvmeXsBg&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=kite+aerial+photography&spell=1
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
in the U.S. sending payloads into "near space" on a fairly regular basis. It's much more common than most people would suspect. I've seen a rough estimate of ~1500 people in the U.S. who are involved with near space experimentation. It's very cool stuff and one of the few minimally regulated amateur sciences still available to those so inclined in the U.S.
An excellent primer is the Near Space Book: http://www.parallax.com/tabid/567/Default.aspx
Here are several links to active near space groups:
Treasure Valley Near Space Program: http://www.tvnsp.org/
Arizona Near Space Research: http://www.ansr.org/node/7
JP Aerospace: http://www.jpaerospace.com/
Most of these groups often need help with tracking and launching and at very least will share what they have learned with those interested.
If you look closely at this photo of their tracking computer, its a MacBook Pro running Ubuntu :-)
What's cool here is that all this home-made hobbyist-grade electronics worked all the way to Space! I would have thought that the camera had at least a part of the space around the lenses hermetically sealed (which would lead to it exploding in low pressure) but apparently not. In addition to the low pressure (bordering vacuum) there's the coldness and the ice crystals. How did the batteries survive the temperatures? Not that it was a long flight (few hours) but still... everything is more resilient than I thought it would be.
-- Sig down
They have a site with info on the project http://teslabs.com/meteotek08/ where they explain how they did it and they difficulties they faced, it's in Catalan so you might want to use Google to translate it.
Apparently they had to postpone the launch several times due to the weather conditions. They finally launched one day before their permission from AENA -the Spanish civil aviation authority- expired.
"At over 100,000ft the balloon lost its inflation and the equipment was returned to the earth . . . We travelled 10km to find the sensors and photographic card, which was still emitting its signal, even though it had been exposed to the most extreme conditions."
I'm guessing it crashed back to earth without a parachute, and the memory cards weren't damaged . . . If it had a parachute, it would drift way more than 10km! I'd really like to see more info on the hardware . . . looks like it was mostly luck that it worked . . .
Awesome photos and sites. Why don't we shoot up space tourists this way? Sure, landing may be somewhat less safe but it would be much cheaper I assume! ;D
(I'll also note that they don't use NASA equipment to do this; they buy or build their own hardware).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So was it a software hack that allowed the camera to operate the baloon, or was it a camera-equipped weather balloon? If it was camera operated, would it operate other things such as drone planes and kites?
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/15/1829244
First you need a really huge balloon to lift a human being to that sort of altitude. Secondly getting down again isn't just 'somewhat less safe', it is downright insanely dangerous.
Also, since the flight time is relatively long, you need good life support. A few minutes zooming up to 62 miles really just requires a sealed cabin. Spending 5-6 hours ascending, most of which is above 30,000 feet where you can actually breath, requires temperature control and some amount of regulation of the atmosphere inside the capsule. Overall it may actually be easier to use a space plane, once you know how to build it.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
20 miles above is not in space. It is just over the tropopause, where the wheather is made. Biggest clouds can reach to 8 miles above. Intercontinental flights know it and fly about ten miles high.
When you reach 100 miles, we could talk about space again. ;-)