Slashdot Mirror
Balloon and Duct Tape Deliver Great Space Photos
krou writes "With a budget of £500, Robert Harrison used cheap parts, a weather balloon, some duct tape, a digital camera, and a GPS device to capture some great photos of the earth from space that resulted in NASA calling him to find out how he had done it. 'A guy phoned up who worked for NASA who was interested in how we took the pictures,' said Mr Harrison. 'He wanted to know how the hell we did it. He thought we used a rocket. They said it would have cost them millions of dollars.' The details of his balloon are as follows: he used 'an ordinary Canon camera mounted on a weather balloon,' 'free software' that 'reprogrammed the camera to wake up every five minutes and take eight photographs and a video before switching off for a rest.' He also ensured the camera was 'wrapped in loft insulation' to make sure it could operate at the cold temperatures. The GPS device allowed him to pinpoint the balloon's location, and retrieve the camera when it fell down to earth attached to a small parachute."
The little brother is taking pictures. And videos...
He posts them to the Internet for the rest of the little brothers and sisters to see.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... can be found here: http://www.robertharrison.org/icarus/wordpress/?page_id=36
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I read an article about some kids doing that a while ago, but they did it better. They bought a prepaid cellphone with a GPS receiver built in that they reprogrammed to send them the coordinates of the balloon ever few minutes. The basket was a Styrofoam food container with chemical hand warmers that they used to keep the equipment warm. When the balloon landed, they just followed the coordinates the phone sent them.
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Its also pretty sad that the engineers at NASA never thought of it...
They not only thought of it, they did it, although without the duct tape. However, they did use duct tape to keep the Apollo 13 astronauts alive on their way back from the moon (see "Moon Lost" in your favorite library).
A lot of early NASA weather baloons were seen as UFOs. NASA called the guy because they thought he launched a rocket.
Free Martian Whores!
he's european.... they're more polite than we asshole americans :)
I agree. There have been at least 3 nearly identical experiments posted on Slashdot in the last two years. All of them used weather balloons that got to around 100,000 feet. It's neat, but it's nothing new. There's no way NASA thought this was amazing. If someone from NASA called, it was a janitor or something, not an engineer.
Perhaps you were just trying to be funny... But no, we aren't.
We europeans have a lot of negative stereotypes about americans: A man combining all of them would be slightly overweight, would never read books, would be ignorant about the rest of the world but still overly patriotic and confident that USA is the best place on earth. He would shout out odd political statements such as "I oppose the war but support our troops!" and "I disagree with the president but still support him because he is our president!". He also might chant "free trade free trade free trade..." fanatically... You get the idea by now.
However, impoliteness is not one of the stereotypes. I've personally never heard anyone claim that americans would be extraordinarily rude... In fact, that is a word that most of us would probably associate with the french.
but the photos are only of where the balloon landed. A better dad would have shown them how to use GPS and a timer. At least we answered the question "Where does the wind go?" http://www.ualconsulting.com/joshua-and-ari/weatherballoon.htm