Slashdot Mirror
Australian Student Balloon Rises 100,000 Feet, With a Digital Camera
hype7 writes "An Australian student at Deakin University had a fascinating idea for a final project — to send a balloon up 100,000ft (~30,000 metres) into the stratosphere with a digital camera attached. The university was supportive, and the project took shape. Although there were some serious hitches along the way, the project was successful, and he managed to retrieve the balloon — with the pictures. What's really amazing is that the total cost was so low; the most expensive part was buying the helium gas for approximately AUD$250 (~USD$200)."
From Wired
It was actually a group of Spanish students who initially did this earlier this year for the first time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005022/Teens-capture-images-of-space-with-56-camera-and-balloon.html and it also got slashdotted (and they didn't get the ISO wrong...).
(Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 23, @04:06PM )
(Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 18 2009, @04:33PM )
(Posted by Zonk on Saturday September 30 2006, @03:38AM)
Always interesting to see the twists applied to previous attempts at the same task.. I know what idea I'm putting in my 6 yr old's mind for his first science fair....
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/
The only real difference is that this one went a bit higher (100,000 ft) where as the MIT guys made it 93,000. Still pretty close though.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
...and even more amazing is that at about 800 sites around the world, various national weather services do this same thing twice daily. Oh and they have been doing it at least since the 1950's.
100,000 feet is nothing special. They regularly go higher than that.
Anyhow, this is how most of the atmospheric layer and wind information is obtained --- not by satellite.
its usually the reporters that call it "the edge of space" even the author calls it the stratosphere. I'm part of that Alberta HD video balloon group. We like to call it "Near Space" which is defined as: "Near space is the region of Earth's atmosphere that lies between 65,000 and 325,000-350,000 feet (20 to 100 km) above sea level, encompassing the stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere." We're not in space, but were way up there!
http://casa.gov.au/scripts/nc.dll?WCMS:PWA::pc=PARTS101
I don't see why ANY of this is a big deal. Joe Kittinger RODE a balloon up over 100,000 and then jumped out, with cameras rolling. OK, they weren't digital cameras, and the whole job cast a lot more than $200. but it was back in the 60's...
During the test his suit leaked but he kept going http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excelsior
Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcT8lKKpeXs&feature=related
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This isn't something new, my undergrad university (DePauw University in Indiana) has been sending balloons 100,000 feet (I think our record is about 110,000) with digital cameras for about 5 years: http://www.depauw.edu/acad/physics/base/ Each student had a pod with their own designed experiment, a requirement for a physics course. We bought our system from Taylor University, who have been doing it twice as long.
To be fair, it was kind of tough to tell the scale from the pictures of it flying. Once it got close to the ground, it was obvious to anyone who'd seen that one episode of mythbusters like five years ago. But until then, there just wasn't anything to reference its size to, except maybe the skin crinkle, which would have required extensive knowledge of the material to make judgements based upon.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think that the reason that the newspapers printed this article was because it had a nice story to go with it. These high altitude balloon projects seem to be a bit of a hot topic at the moment. (I'm the Geoff from the Article)
Yes there have been many similar projects done by others for many years - I'm quite surprised that this story ended up going this far. Mine was a Uni project that I went about by myself, there aren't a lot of technical details in the article but the aim of the project from an engineering point of view was to build a data logging system that would function without fail at very low temperatures. Of course I wanted it to take nice pictures along the way, but this was really just because I thought it would be nice to have my own pictures from "Near Space". Other than the electronics/software design that went in to it, I put the system through low temperature environmental testing so that I could prove (mainly to myself) that the system would work before I launched it. I worked on it part time over a year, there was a lot that went in to it at the end.
I encourage others that are interested in this hobby to give it a try, it's a lot of fun and a lot more challenging than it seems. I gave it a go, learnt from it, and now plan another launch. I still haven't decided what to put in to the payload for next time round, so here's a question for the /. crowd:
What would you pack in a high altitude balloon project payload?
The black gadget at the top of the picture appears to be one of my OpenTracker+ kits - I see that Geoff ordered a couple back in May. So I'm going to take this opportunity for a brief shameless plug:
http://www.argentdata.com/products/otplus.html
His main payload computer looks to be wholly custom-built, but the OpenTracker+ (that handles taking data from the GPS receiver and transmitting it over the radio) is an off-the-shelf kit that takes maybe an hour to build, if you don't want to pay an extra few bucks for a pre-assembled unit.
It's based on the Freescale MC908JL16 microcontroller, the full source code is available under the BSD license, and it'll compile with the free version of the Codewarrior IDE. It's got a serial bootloader, so there's no need for a device programmer. If you're comfortable with C programming, it's a very cheap way to build a simple, customizable tracking and telemetry system. Or just run the regular firmware and it'll do a whole bunch of stuff without modification.
Its larger cousin, the Tracker2, does a whole lot more and the code is released under GPLv3, but unfortunately you can't compile it with the free version of the IDE. It does include a simple scripting engine, though - written mostly so balloon builders would stop bugging me with minor ad hoc changes for their particular setup.
Scott
N1VG