www.csua.org/u/p2i -> www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget?
Even Google runs the world's biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space. The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work. Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn't find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Lee and Yeh took a road trip in order to stop prevailing winds from taking the balloon out onto the Atlantic, and checked in on the University of Wisconsin's balloon trajectory website to estimate the landing site. Because of spotty cellphone coverage in central Massachusetts, it was important to keep the rig in the center of the state so it could be found upon landing. Light winds meant the guys got lucky and, although the cellphone's external antenna was buried upon landing, the fix they got as the balloon was coming down was close enough. The Photographs The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet.
CHDK (Canon Hacker's Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon's cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8-GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight. The picture you see above was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took 40 minutes to come back to Earth. What is most astonishing about this launch, named Project Icarus, is that anyone could do it. The budget is so small as to be almost nonexistent (the guys slept in their car the night before the launch to save money), so that even if everything went wrong, a second, third or fourth attempt would be easy. All it took was a grand idea and an afternoon poking around the hardware store. The project website has few details on how the balloon was put together -- but the students say they will be posting the step-by-step instructions soon. UPDATE: The instructions will be available for free, not $150, as earlier reported.
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Retrieve sign-in Please enter your e-mail address or username below. Your username and password will be sent to the e-mail address you provided us E-mail address or Username Submit Loading Close * Posted by: djsmiley2k | 09/15/09 | 8:00 am While this is very good showing what students can achieve, the BBC (in the uk) recently did this on a TV show using an action figure, for (if i remember correctly) around the same cost, with pretty much the same equipment too. They even got video of it going up, to the point at which it reached "space" and then falling back to earth (didn't get the whole journey back down as the batteries died someway on the fall). I dont know if they did it with these students, but are they saying they did it first? I understand that space bgeins at 62Mi high and this is only 18Mi but still. I've never understood why (other than a rather large size) you cannot follow F117nghthawk's suggestion to save some of the initial fuel weight/costs of a space launch. Also why do we need rockets to launch communication satellites if we could just launch a couple of hundred balloon based systems instead for the same or less money? That's probably not possible due to the fact that you would need an absurd number of balloons to be able to lift the weight of the hardware (rockets or satellites, etc). These guys were only lifting a 165g camera and a few other light pieces.
org/wiki/Space_Shuttle the space shuttle weighs 2,029,203Kg. To launch the space shuttle you'd need 144,943,071 party balloons. Clearly this would be spectacular but a bit impractical. A 30 meter diameter balloon can lift 14,000Kg of payload. To lift that space shuttle you'd still need to string together 145 of these blimps in a bunch. You'd probably need 200 of them to get a decent rate of lift. Again, it would be an awesome sight, but I just can't see NASA taking us seriously. Shouldn't there be some sort of basic-safety protections necessary to prevent this as much as possible? These people basically got lucky they didn't kill anyone. I'd also be pretty pissed off if a beer cooler fell from the heavens into my yard only to discover it was not, in fact, full of beer.
org/wiki/Space_Shuttle the space shuttle weighs 2,029,203Kg. To launch the space shuttle you'd need 144,943,071 party balloons. Clearly this would be spectacular but a bit impractical. A 30 meter diameter balloon can lift 14,000Kg of payload. To lift that space shuttle you'd still need to string together 145 of these blimps in a bunch. You'd probably need 200 of them to get a decent rate of lift. Again, it would be an awesome sight, but I just can't see NASA taking us seriously." I wonder if they used mylar balloons if it would be a better coefficient? I would love to see the next space craft lifting off under millions of garfield happy birthday balloons! In order to get injured by it, you'd have to stand directly under it, looking straight at it, so that it got you in the eye. Although I guess it could cause some confusion if it landed on a car hood. Just think of the catastrophe if an airliner became entangled in the ascending or descending balloon. It's a great example of an ex post facto rule -- it's legal right up until the moment that someone or something gets hurt. A hardier, larger, balloon, with a system to pop it by radio, a few guidance rockets, and you've got yourself a space chilled beer delivery system! They were using GPS and sending out the location via packet radio on 2 meters. They sent me a cool photo taken from that height, and yes, you could see the earth's curvature. For landing, they attached the ballon above a parachute.
org/ - Mike * Posted by: maarekstele | 09/15/09 | 11:36 am Escape velocity is a term meaning the momentum needed to escape Earth's Gravitational pull back to it's surface. The other is actually an orbit which you need to spin around the earth many times and that violates peace treaties. Now, an orbiting satellite is actually falling, but falling around the earth rather than to it. The closer the satellite to the earth, the faster it's moving. Fixed Satellites are 1 diameter earth length away from the planet at the Equator, which is why Satellite tv is pointing in a certain direction for everyone. Now Balloons can never be a satellite orbiting the earth. Basically, Helium will sit on top of the ozone layer or highest densest layer of air in the sky based on the weight of the load within the balloon.
html * Posted by: scoop | 09/15/09 | 11:46 am And as anyone who's seen October Sky will know, you're not smart if you have to use a website and gps to figure out where your package is going to land :P * Posted by: re3e | 09/15/09 | 12:25 pm those guys and burt rutan totally show that nasa admins are more after budgets then actual science , i bet they could probably design orion on a third world country budget * Posted by: HipCat | 09/15/09 | 12:39 pm there's another reason that using a balloon system won't work as well, if i remember this right that is. from what i've read on zepplins/blimps is that the amount of helim or hydrogen required to lift large loads doesn't multiply regularly with the load. what is the effect of al...
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