Slashdot Mirror
High Schoolers Push Down Price of Near-Space Photography
Floodge writes "High School students at Explore Knowledge Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada have launched a near space photography balloon which took over 2000 pictures of Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, Lake Mead, Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, and much more! The 'space craft' was built from used and recycled components for under 60 dollars and was inspired by MIT students Project Icarus in 2009."
Near-space photography via balloon isn't quite new any more, but price is a great frontier to explore. And I'm glad that there's a school called "Explore Knowledge Academy."
I saw the site for a second... and boom... server goes down.
Tis' better to have looked and lost than to have never looked before.
Live forever, or die trying.
Since when is 95,000 feet of altitude in "space?"
I believe they used the term "Near Space," which lies between 65,000 and 350,000 feet.
any minute now. Clearly these kids are terrorists. Why eles would they be taking photos of the Hoover Dam? Lake Meade? Las Vegas! IIRC not even tourists are allowed to photo the dam itself anymore.
http://vimeo.com/22150511 This has the video of the images taken.
Mathematician, n.:
Someone who believes imaginary things appear right before your i's.
Their website (http://www.projectviking.org/equipment) says:
"Equipment
We innovated upon and continued the trend of low-cost flight platforms, building our craft entirely from off the shelf components for close to 75 dollars."
Also, they say they had sponsorship for the GPS unit and Helium.
Cosplayers.net - The Cosplayers Network
Considering that the moon landing was STAGED in a desert it just might!
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
I'm Surprised, not for the kids but at the Government. Where was the DHS in all of this and why didn't they shoot it down as a suspected Al Qaeda drone?
I have visions of F16s being scrambled from Nellis to go attack the invading force.
It's great to see that kids still have teachers and sponsors who will help them do something great. Yes, we may consider it small potatoes in some circles but still, this is High School! They're putting fricken sharks with laser beams at stratospheric heights!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
isn't there a team that will work on image stabilization?
I mean near space cheap photography has been done many times.
What's really missing is something to get a stable shooting of the images
right now, it makes me wanna puke!!! Then the animation would really be cool!
We live in a country where most people can't explain how the tides or fracking magnets work. (Shout out to Bill O'Reilly and other juggalos) We live in a country where the science content of "Mythbusters" is considered too difficult to understand for the average population. We live in a country where a sweet young woman who recently graduated from high school asked my wife if she drove back to the States from her visit home to Japan.
Anything -- ANYTHING -- that fans the dying embers of inquiry in this country should be encouraged. "Hey, how about that?! It's a real pain in the ass to fold even a piece of toilet paper as long as a few football fields more than 12 times. Hey, the higher you go, the colder it gets, and the more you can see. I wonder if..."
Things have gotten so bad in this country, I'm ready to fall back to toddler teaching techniques. "What, you mixed vinegar and baking soda and it got all fizzy? Hooray! Good for you! Do it again! Hey, have you seen what Diet Coke and Mentos do?"
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
From Wikipedia:
"From late 1944 until early 1945, the Japanese launched over 9,300 of these fire balloons, of which 300 were found or observed in the U.S. Despite the high hopes of their designers, the balloons were ineffective as weapons, and caused only six deaths (from one single incident)—a kill rate of 0.067%—and a small amount of damage."
So, yes, it has happened. Once. In all of recorded history.
By this reasoning, my wife's family should have shunned me as a possible bomber pilot there to drop a nuclear bomb, since that had happened twice.
My mind boggles at the level of paranoia it takes to go from "Hey, look a balloon" to "Maybe it's from the terrorists! Run away, run away!"
Did you avoid bunnies after watching "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" too?
The world is a dangerous place. There are sharks in the water. They have eaten people. But if that fear keep your toes dry on the sand, then I feel sorry for you. I can't imagine living in that much fear all the time.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I'm going to put on my buzz kill hat and say that it's only a matter of time before one of these contraptions is going to get sucked into a jet engine or foul a propellor.
The FAA does have rules on flying unmanned balloons. They say things like don't operate them near airports, deploy them only on days with less than 50% cloud coverage, if they're deployed at night they have to have blinking lights, etc. Without more details, we don't really know if these kids followed those rules or not, but they're pretty simple rules to follow, and given the sophistication of their device I'm betting these kids were capable of following them.
They'd only be collision hazards during the limited time periods of ascent and descent. At 95,000 feet, there is no traffic of any kind except for those that bring their own oxidants with them (rockets.) And when you think about it, airspace is really really big, so the chances of a mid-air collision are vanishingly small. When you say "a matter of time", you might be talking thousands of years.
As far as a jet engine vs. this contraption, well, given that it's being lifted by a balloon less than a meter in diameter, it's probably made of the lightest mass plastic components possible, and would have a pretty small chance of causing damage to an engine. And consider the worst case, where the battery gets sucked into the engine and explodes. In the middle of a screaming combustion chamber. Designed to burn gallons of Jet-A fuel every second. It's probably not going to make too much of an impact there.
John
...then we know it's all good.
"The most developed nations?" You mean what we used to call the First World? OK, so in competition with all the countries that aren't walking in shambling horror like Rwanda, we're getting beat by more than half of them. Your sample includes Mexico, a nation that can't protect it's own mayors, police chiefs and judges. And you're proud of this?! With the exception of Germany, by your own numbers we're getting beaten by anyone who's anyone, including members recovering from historically recent wars and occupations, and you think we're doing OK? The UK is number four. We're ten spots down from that, despite the fact the we have orders of magnitude more resources to work with.
You're OK with this? Ask me how I know you don't have any kids.
And when you were young, per-capita education and health care spending in the US was a fraction of what it is today (in constant dollars), so lack of spending is not what killed those dreams.
Simply not true. When I was a boy, we were in the middle of the Space Race. Education was almost getting properly funded. Teachers weren't taking part-time jobs to get by. Textbooks were not considered a rare and precious resource. Field trips did not spur panicked begging for the parents to chip in. Schools didn't whore themselves out to McDonalds and Burger King hoping to get a few bucks.
This is how I know you haven't spent any time near a public classroom lately. You know what parents buy for schools these days? Toilet paper. Copy paper. Pencils. My school district just took up a collection to buy gas for the school buses, and I'm in a wealthier school district. The large amount of money getting collected is not reaching the classroom, and if you don't know that, then you just don't know what you're talking about. I live in a school district that includes literally million-dollar homes and our teachers dress in cast-offs from Goodwill and drive 20-year-old cars.
I'm not even going to worry about refuting this because anyone who's a parent these days knows. Every scientist I know or ever met is either livid or in despair about the state of science education in public school today -- and yeah, I'm very comfortable making that statement on Slashdot. Have you even heard about what's going on with the Texas State Board of Education? Any working scientists who wanna jump in with t2t10 and talk about what a great job we're doing teaching science in the US, by all means speak up.
What exactly about your field do you feel our public schools are doing a wonderful job of explaining?
My personal experience agrees with the statistics
The statistics? We've talked about this before. The statistics are that we're getting beaten by Cuba in healthcare and Ireland in education. We're getting our butts handed to us by small island nations with few natural resources. You're bragging that you can place middle of the pack in the Girl Scout softball league.
You sabotage reasonable political debate
Are you even watching the news? I supported Reagan. The first time. In 1980, David Stockman wasn't a raging lunatic when he argued the Laffer Curve and that lower taxes would spur growth which would yield greater overall tax revenue. In 2010, even Stockman has recanted. We live in a world where Massey Energy can kill dozens of miners with impunity, where BP can destroy the Gulf of Mexico, hide it, and still post profits in the Billions in the same quarter. Reagan could almost be reasoned with. The same is not true of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. There is no more "reasonable political debate." The situation is not in doubt, not in 2011. All the tired old ideas, that we can reach Nirvana by cutting taxes for billionaires and bleeding the middle class dry while telling the poor to simply die and decrease the surplus population, that nonsense was empirically disproven decades ago.
education and health care both are quite
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."