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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."
when you can just push the shutter button from your lawn chair.
Nullius in verba
Yeah, of course NASA is too stupid to think of using balloons.
There are pictures, and even nice videos that come out every few months from folks playing around with high altitude balloons. It seems kind of unlikely to me that NASA would have just suddenly discovered this and been amazed. Until there is confirmation from NASA, I'm just going to assume this is BS, either made up by the guy, or some prankster called him.
Slashdotted, pics here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30721501@N05/collections/72157621244472915/
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
This has bee done for year by amateurs. I have been following these people for atleast a couple of years: BEAR
They have some AWESOME video of their attempts.
I wonder why NASA is just now finding about about this stuff???
This is awesome, kudos to the guy who pulled it off.
Its also pretty sad that the engineers at NASA never thought of it...
Actually the "NASA" types were doing that sort of thing many decades ago, pre maned space flight. If you gave this guy hundreds of millions for a budget he would have probably built a fancy rocket too.
No, I'm sure the Earth's curve you noticed is just a lens effect...
Umm a couple of college kids fom MIT did this last year for $150 dollars. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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!
Actually, thats a myth.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
The "space pen" was developed independently from NASA and NASA did in fact use pencils on several early missions.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
he's european.... they're more polite than we asshole americans :)
yep. last september, a couple of kids from MIT... total cost was less than $150.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/
In NYC the driver wouldn't have given you the time to jump out of the way.
In Chicago your warning would have been the burst of gunfire.
Shows how much thinking "out of the box" goes on in top engineering circles today...
Why are you surprised? NASA spent millions to develop a pen that could write in space... the Russians used a pencil. Sometimes people look for a really complicated solution instead of going for something cheap and cheerful that gets-the-job-done.
To be fair, though, NASA saved billions by faking the moon landing.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
FA is a troll and the article likely would not have been published if it wasn't a UK news outlet and didn't include a jab at NASA. NASA funds Spacegrant Consortiums doing high altitude balloon research at several US universities. The one I worked on was very similar except we had a license amateur radio operator so we could legally use an APRS system for tracking the balloon. Back then where was no CHDK to use for a cheap Canon camera so camera was controlled by a 555 timer circuit wired to the shutter button. The highest cost was the helium when you figure in the cost of storing large tanks of compressed gas. Our system was slightly more expensive because the payload usually also contained a logging system that stored additional sensor data like temperature and pressure.