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Students Take Pictures From Space On $150 Budget

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.

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."

8 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. This is hardly anything new by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:This is hardly anything new by cptdondo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But this is in range of a middle school science teacher. That's the beauty of it! Once you break the $500 dollar limit, our underfunded schools in the US can't afford it. Heck, the elementary school my kids go to was happy to received a $200 check I won at a local race. For $150, these kinds of parts can be built using donated stuff. Many people have cell phones they no longer use. Many people have digital cameras they don't use. I can see doing this with some donated materials for $100. Plus the technology is there - no custom built ham radios, just "ordinary" technology we all use on a daily basis. It brings space down to ordinary kids. It would be great if these guys provided drawings and what control they usd for the camera and see if we can launch this at our school.

    2. Re:This is hardly anything new by Kira-Baka · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Some people provide better images too. The site I've linked even provides videos.

    3. Re:This is hardly anything new by Rorschach1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the hardware investment for my balloon project was about $300:

      http://n1vg.net/balloon

      I've got a new payload sitting here ready to go that's a lot cleaner and simpler, and has a 2-hour video capacity. Everything in the payload is off the shelf (granted, the radio/tracker is off my own shelf, it's one of my company's products) except for a DB9 connector and a few wires that took a few minutes to solder together. The housing is the top half of a magnum wine shipper, and all of the components (battery, radio, GPS) just wedge in between the foam pieces intended to hold the neck of the bottle. The camcorder is held in with rubber bands:

      http://n1vg.net/images/payload1.jpg
      http://n1vg.net/images/payload2.jpg
      http://n1vg.net/images/payload3.jpg

      The acrylic window that goes over the end took me about 3 minutes to fabricate on a CNC milling machine and could be easily and cheaply replicated.

      It'd be cheaper to build a transmit-only version of this system, but having a receiver lets you do useful stuff like control a cutdown device. This particular payload doesn't have one yet, but it can be as simple as a 1-watt resistor that you drive at 3 watts for several seconds to melt through a Nylon or Spectra cord. Maybe an extra buck worth of hardware.

      I might launch this thing as soon as next month if I can find the time. Possibly from the Mojave desert again, or maybe from the Cuyama Valley, a little closer to home. Ground crew and chase team volunteers are always welcome.

      At some point I'd like to have a ready-to-fly kit to sell at a reasonable price to schools, along with enough instructional materials to get them started. I just don't have the time for it right now.

    4. Re:This is hardly anything new by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    5. Re:This is hardly anything new by shimage · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not new. There is a balloon class at the University of Washington. They launch a weather balloon with "payloads" designed (sort of, anyway) and built by students from an airport in the middle of nowhere (well, Central Washington) at the end of the class. The professors handle telemetry, which no doubt costs more than $150, but since the bandwidth is so low, they can't telemeter images anyway, so recovery is required. Incidentally, every payload has been recovered so far. Three or four years ago, an ambitious student that knew a bit more than most about digital electronics strapped a camera onto the payload just for shits and giggles (yes, self-powered and rigged to trigger every minute or so). The images he got back were pretty amazing, so after that the professors started offering extra credit for cameras, and every year at least one group gets a good set of pictures. In fact, last year they got one on the way up of an airplane that came a bit closer than it should have. The reason why no one has heard of this before is because no one thinks it's interesting enough to tell the press about; except MIT students, who apparently think that everything they do is hot shit.

    6. Re:This is hardly anything new by mystic414 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Give them credit for creative problem-solving.

      They get no credit for creative problem-solving when four teenagers in Spain did the same thing six months ago:

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005022/Teens-capture-images-of-space-with-56-camera-and-balloon.html

  2. Re:... they used a cellphone GPS? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    Bruce Perens.