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)."
See, you can get a lot higher up without a kid inside.
Didn't some kids at MIT send a balloon out of the atmosphere for less than $150 USD recently? What's so special about this?
From Wired
...Commander, your bounty has been paid. I guess koalas are next.
I'd say. When the basket fell off, I was sure the boy was dead!
They should keep it fastened down a little better.
Now that the methodology has been worked out, sending a camera up to 100kft is becoming a pretty common university and ham club team project. Provided care is taken during assembly, the biggest gotchas are while inflating the balloon, and hoping the winds keep the payload over an area with suitable roads.
It'd be neat to see more teams collect additional science, with live TM for extra points. A few years back, a few college students in Beautiful B.C. designed their own UAV, which flew home after release a 60kft. Nowadays, it's possible to take a crack at that without CS/EE-level knowledge of control logic, but would still be a neat challenge. Too bad FAA regs make it of iffy legality in the US.
Luke, help me take this mask off
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...).
Seriously take a look at http://jpaerospace.com/ Basically since we started Space travel we've been into macho cowboys who suit up, rocket scientists, and massive flight control systems. Lets face it, the slow boat from Europe or the Middle East, or China still gets here, just a whole lot cheaper. These balloon cams one day is going to get people into space thinking.... What if we could remove about a good 90% of the thrust problem? What if?
...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.
Now we can say that all those stories about high altitude camera stealing gremlins probably aren't true..
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Mother fuckers, I attend the Burwood campus at Deakin University and I'm an SIT student and I wanted to do something very similar (Attach some Arduino data logging for sensors etc.) and they told me no and didn't want to hear anything more about it even though I said I could fund it myself, instead this tool who can't even set a camera right does it with University support. I attend the damn university and not even I get to find out about this stuff until I see it on Slashdot! Fuck the "Deakin Experience", they don't give a flying fuck about anyone else other than postgrads and masters students.
I can just see the Australian patent lawyers revving their engines again. Thank goodness those MIT students did this before and have prior art so we won't see another stop-stealing-our-toy-designs lawsuit.
coding is life
Well, you see, if NASA can smack the Moon's ass in the dark and get people all worked up over nothing, why not some Aussie dweeb that can't set a camera? Special just means vastly underachieved these days it seems...
Ahhhh, the celebration of mediocrity.
Can someone summarize what those are or explain the American equivalent? I mean, how do you avoid taking out an airliner's engine or some such thing?
There's been a lot of them go up this year! :P
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.
Used a hacked Cannon camera.
http://www.francescobonomi.it/ICBNN
http://icbnn.wordpress.com/
Anyhow, this is how most of the atmospheric layer and wind information is obtained --- not by satellite.
Seems like it would've been easier to put little propellers on the satellites to measure the wind than to have to fly a balloon every day.
And before anyone replies, yes, this is a joke. I know this wouldn't work, since the little propellers would fly the satellites off course...
Of course, it would be useful if they could retrieve those sats in one piece rather then the million from having been dropped. See, the CU students SHOULD have gone to CSU and learned how to do decent balloons FIRST. Heck, a CSU balloon can haul around a 6 y.o, and they even have practice runs for it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seems like 110,000 feet is quite common for university balloon flights. The University of Cambridge in the UK also has a project which has been reaching that height for a while (33km). What is interesting there is that they're planning to launch rockets from the balloon, and hoping to reach 150km. You can see their plans at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cuspaceflight/martlet.php. Don't know what their costs are.
Cool, so if we can get a baloon with payloads of say 1/2 a pound pure, which is what.... $20k of cocaine.
Wait for favourable winds/direction. Make sure its blue so it cant easily be seen.
Fire it up, with a tiny cpu (use old nokia without screen/plastic cover running MIDP2 java app).
Once it reachs a GPS region or into USA, deflate one of the baloons to desend not too fast, and sms the gps coordinate 5 seconds before hitting the ground.
Drive up and pick it up at leasure.
Im sure if you write up a nice prospectus, any dealer would purchase this 'kit' for $2k.
If the potential is to make millions, im sure they are doing it now already.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
that's been done by a hobbyist years ago. Incredibly cool project. can't seem to find it now, i read an extensive website about it years ago. Some kid and his brother spent years building an airframe, and pack a gps and embedded computer that steers the plane back "home", 2-way radio modem, camera, the lot. Someone post the link please
Not too sure about Australia, but here in NL we have much the same regulations.
If I were to 'do the right thing' and write to the aviation authorities here saying I intend to let loose a big ol' helium balloon capable of reaching 30,000 feet and higher, with a digital camera attached, they would smack me down citing all sorts of safety regulations (camera into jet engine = potential loss of engine power and all that.. they tend to be less squishy than birds - which do enough damage as it is).
But if I were to 'just do it', I get to have a fun project, a great experience, and possibly awesome results to share with friends and indeed the world. Last, but not least, very little chance that the authorities would come after me after-the-fact (unless the thing -did- get sucked into some jet engine or otherwise disrupted air traffic).
The same applies to ventures into abandoned factories, for example. It's not your land, not your property, you're legally trespassing and if caught the owner will probably tell you to get the hell off of his property.. but you'll already have the experience of going there, maybe photos, etc. If you were to write first, you've got odds against you.. if the owner says 'sure, go ahead', and you get into an accident at the site, they'll be liable.. odds are, thus, that you'll get a big fat "no, you may not go onto my property".
Rules may not be meant to be broken, but life tends to be more interesting when you do break them.
Given the high cost of helium, why not use hydrogen? Helium is safer, of course, but it's not an issue in-flight when there's no human dangling from the balloon. There is a risk at the time of filling, but even then, I don't see how it's more dangerous than handling a bottle of propane for your kitchen. Especially outside. Leaking H2 will go straight up and will not build up to pose much of a threat.
Am I missing something?
This would be awesome for OpenAerialMap. It's a shame there's no freely available photography dataset of the world yet.
Look at Slashdot just lobbing up softballs. Swing away, folks...
I estimate 10 million of these balloons have been launched with sensing instruments and radio telemetry. (Twice a day, more than 50 years, 800 sites currently but hundreds since the 1960's= 2x50x365x400 = more than 10 M). There is nothing very interesting about these students doing it.
These camera stories are kind of "eye-candy" science: pleasing to look at but not much substance. There is no trick to launching a balloon with a camera attached... and apart from being outright fun, there isn't any research advancement either into atmospherics or into the engineering technology of launching an instrument package with a balloon. They even do it the easy (safe) way with helium instead of hydrogen. BTW, this is kind of wasteful. Helium is a scarce resource.
The current telemetry packages attached to the weather balloons contain a telemetry transmitter, a GPS receiver, and humidity/temperature sensors. This provides wind speed, direction, altitude, location, temperature, and humidity.
Now, if the students did something interesting such as:
1. Adding in a light weight low-cost stabilizer and remote control package to steady and aim the camera
2. Modify the camera with filters to observe a parameter that is not usually measured (ie: perhaps infrared, uv, etc)
3. Attach a laser and test out a methodology for measuring parameters within a range of the balloon
4. Create a 360 scanning system and analyze the images in real time to provide cloud formation information
5. Created a wireless grid that co-ordinated and measured information from multiple synchronous balloon launces in the same relative area
6. or something else creative, imaginative, and useful
THEN this would be an interesting story. Else just fluff.
If /. publishes another "student loses camera attached to stupid weather balloon" then I'm going to start submitting pictures of our pets. "Man uses $1000 camera to take thousands of pictures of children and dogs".
In your face, Flat Earth Society!
Australian Student Balloon Rises 100,000 Feet, With a Digital Camera
they have been doing it at least since the 1950's
Umm, yeah, I'm gonna need a citation on that.
Same thing happened to me a few years ago at Disney World when I was attempting to juggle a hot dog, my digital camera, and some Mickey Mouse balloons I had bought for the kids. The strings got tangled in the camera and when I went to munch on the hot dog, the balloon slipped from my fingers and I watched helplessly as my camera sailed into the unknown.
But it gets better!
Several weeks later, I received an anonymous UPS package containing my digital camera! A quick glance showed that the Disney shots were still there, but there were some added shots that were somehow snapped on my camera's inadvertent journey. Some brief examples: (a) a shot of a 757 passenger jet with some astonished but blurred looking people looking out at Mickey; (2) a shot that showed a rocket launch at the Cape - from above!; (3) a nice clear shot that showed another group of brightly painted balloons that read "Visit Exciting Sydney!"; (4) a dim but unmistakable shot of the Shuttle as it came in for re-entry.
Of course there were a bunch more boring random shots of earth from way up high, but who cares about those?
I suspect I am not alone in this - has anyone else ever run an inadvertent "experiment" that accidentally took you to the edge of space? If getting close to the final frontier is actually this easy, it won't be long before we make it to the moon!
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
I may have seen the same thing, except it was a concept when I saw it. They had done the balloon trip a few times, and the airplane was their next plan. I didn't know that they had done it. Unfortunately, I don't have the link either.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
No. It could have been, not it must have been. He got the camera back in working order, so it didn't cost him. If you buy a car then drive over to your uncle's house, you don't say that it cost $20,000 dollars to drive to your uncle's house, do you? Why am I replying to an AC when the answer is obvious to everyone elsde and the AC probably won't even see it. That just cost me a minute of my life...
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Do notice the tilde next to USD$200. It commonly (in mathematics circles, anyway) stands for "approximately." I hope you agree that USD$200 is not far off enough to invalidate the tilde.
I hope YOU agree that $230 is closer to $250 (the AUD price) than it is to $200 (the incorrect USD "equivalent" given in the article). In other words, the author would have been LESS wrong if he gave no equivalent and left everyone to assume that the $250 was USD.
Can't you see that the accuracy went *backwards* when he gave an "equivalent"?
How hard is it to look up an online currency service like xe.com and get a current figure?
Sheesh! I though this was a nerd website.
I am anarch of all I survey.