Students Take Pictures From Space On $150 Budget

An anonymous reader writes "Two MIT students have successfully photographed the earth from space on a strikingly low budget of $148. Perhaps more significantly, they managed to accomplish this feat using components available off-the-shelf to the average layperson, opening the door for a new generation of amateur space enthusiasts. The pair plan to launch again soon and hope that their achievements will inspire teachers and students to pursue similar endeavors."

Comments

This is hardly anything new

[Bruce Perens]

Groups like EOSS have been doing this for at least 30 years, probably more. It's very common for a balloon launch to be a featured event in a ham radio conference. Their budgets per payload are similar, although they are able to do more technical work than featured in the MIT students work and often design their own radios, command devices, etc. None of this, though, is out of the range of a dedicated amateur. Note that there is a software-defined GPS in development that might be the best way to get around the 20K foot altitude limit of consumer GPS devices. Its component cost is pretty low, despite the $495 cost charged for an assembled device at that site.

Re:This is hardly anything new

[Bruce Perens]

Another thing they can do is use a part-15 or Amateur transmitter. Now that there is no Morse Code requirement, passing the lowest level of ham test is something you can do with a few hours study. And then you can have live TV from the balloon, and you can command it to cut down the balloon when you wish.

Re:... they used a cellphone GPS?

[Bruce Perens]

It was in line-of-sight to the tower. Most of the signal loss is from obstacles on the ground. When you have line-of-sight, you can go very far.

That's why use of cell phones at altitude is illegal. They illuminate thousands of cell cites all of the way to the horizon, and probably lock users out of a frequency on every one of those sites. It's sort of a denial-of-service attack.