Australian Student Balloon Rises 100,000 Feet, With a Digital Camera 174
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)."
Re:Altitude (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought the same thing as well.
I'm in Australia, even the people here are calling it a publicity stunt, although, if thats true then I don't understand the actual benefit the family gets with the publicity... aren't they described as a "crackpot" family?
Fuck Deakin (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Altitude (Score:4, Interesting)
I say send a UAV up with it. Float it up, and then see how far you can fly/glide from 100k feet. :)
Ahh, the ways we could piss off the FAA. I know some of the regulations, and that's half of why I haven't built half the stuff I want to. :)
Re:Altitude (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it can't miss Earth from up there. I just did the calculations. At 20 miles up, that adds only 32187 meters to the radius of the Earth. Working through the math, it means that the acceleration due to gravity is 9.7 m/s^2.
At sea level, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2.
Thus, sea level escape velocity is 11201 meters per second
Escape velocity at 20 miles up is 11152 meters per second.
The difference is 49 meters per second, or 110 MPH.
Now, to pick a gun at random, let's choose the US Army's M198 Howitzer. It's an artillery piece that fires projectiles at approximately 760 meters per second. So you need to have a much bigger cannon, and a much bigger balloon.
a new way to import cocaine from mexico (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool, so if we can get a baloon with payloads of say 1/2 a pound pure, which is what.... $20k of cocaine.
Wait for favourable winds/direction. Make sure its blue so it cant easily be seen.
Fire it up, with a tiny cpu (use old nokia without screen/plastic cover running MIDP2 java app).
Once it reachs a GPS region or into USA, deflate one of the baloons to desend not too fast, and sms the gps coordinate 5 seconds before hitting the ground.
Drive up and pick it up at leasure.
Im sure if you write up a nice prospectus, any dealer would purchase this 'kit' for $2k.
If the potential is to make millions, im sure they are doing it now already.
We all know 'crime' pays... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not too sure about Australia, but here in NL we have much the same regulations.
If I were to 'do the right thing' and write to the aviation authorities here saying I intend to let loose a big ol' helium balloon capable of reaching 30,000 feet and higher, with a digital camera attached, they would smack me down citing all sorts of safety regulations (camera into jet engine = potential loss of engine power and all that.. they tend to be less squishy than birds - which do enough damage as it is).
But if I were to 'just do it', I get to have a fun project, a great experience, and possibly awesome results to share with friends and indeed the world. Last, but not least, very little chance that the authorities would come after me after-the-fact (unless the thing -did- get sucked into some jet engine or otherwise disrupted air traffic).
The same applies to ventures into abandoned factories, for example. It's not your land, not your property, you're legally trespassing and if caught the owner will probably tell you to get the hell off of his property.. but you'll already have the experience of going there, maybe photos, etc. If you were to write first, you've got odds against you.. if the owner says 'sure, go ahead', and you get into an accident at the site, they'll be liable.. odds are, thus, that you'll get a big fat "no, you may not go onto my property".
Rules may not be meant to be broken, but life tends to be more interesting when you do break them.
What would be interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Re:Altitude (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes! A comment about escape velocity. Now I can shoehorn in a really cool fact about Deimos (moon of Mars): it's escape velocity is 20 km/h (13 MPH)!
You could run, jump, and orbit around the thing like Mario in Super Mario Galaxy. That is awesome.
Re:Altitude (Score:1, Interesting)
by not picking a gun at random... .220 swift = 1,284 m/s with a 40 grain bullet. Plus it's significantly lighter. I would put my balloon over the equator and shoot with the direction the earth is spinning (~1670 km/hour, however it's probably faster 20 miles up?)
Also I wouldn't aim for escape velocity, it only takes ~8km/sec to get into orbit. So somehow we need to find another ~5km/sec
Re:So what... (Score:2, Interesting)
> What would you pack in a high altitude balloon project payload?
I would put a collection of a dozen small light-weight balsa gliders in it (ready-to-fly weight perhaps 5 gms each) with ID and "please return location" information on them. Then I'd release them at a fairly high altitude and see how far they went. Such gliders, thrown by hand, have caught risers and flown for miles. Could these cross continents?
Re:So what... (Score:3, Interesting)
well jeff, I'd like to tell that you set-up is almost ready for a Canadian winter. In early 2008 we hit -49 for a couple days ;)
If you'd like to do any environment testing for future projects, just head to Alberta in January/February.
Re:Altitude (Score:3, Interesting)
Just a question from my idle mind... Is escape velocity usually about the same as the lateral velocity of an object in a perfect orbit?
I'm thinking this because the ISS is 350km up, and moves at just over 7,700m/sec.
It seems to make sense that to 'fall around' something, you would have to move 'to the side' just as much as you're 'pulled in' over any given time.