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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.
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.
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?
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".
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.