Video Send Your Own Radiosonde 90,000 Feet Into the Sky (Video) 48
Here's a balloon launch video from Instructure, a company that helps create open source education systems. The point of their balloon work (and Jamel's) is not that they get to boast about what they're doing, but so you and people like you say, "I can make a functioning high altitude weather balloon system with instrumentation and a decent camera for only $1000?" This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount. And who knows? You might break the current high-altitude balloon record of 173,900 feet. Another, perhaps more attainable record is PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) which is currently 96,563 feet. Beyond that? Perhaps you'll want to take a crack at beating Felix Baumgartner's high altitude skydiving and free fall records. And once you are comfortable working with near space launches, perhaps you'll move on to outer space work, where you'll join Elon Musk and other space transportation entrepreneurs. (Alternate Video Link)
Timothy Lord: Jamel you work for Intel but right now you’re highlighting an interesting project that’s not necessarily confined to the company because lots of you have been sending balloons to space, and over the last decade, that’s gotten a lot cheaper, so I want to talk about how commoditized it is right now, you’re holding a balloon right now, start talking about the balloon you sent to space.
Jamel: Absolutely, so this one is the one we used to reach the 97,000 feet that we reached when we launched this very specific experiment. And to answer your question, absolutely, that’s really the idea. Today every component that we are using here is off the shelf. It’s low price, and reasonably – very reasonably priced. And anybody can do it. So that’s really what we wanted to demonstrate and provide a sort of white paper or blueprint for teachers and kids on, “Hey, go out and make your own experiment on top of these!” And again, you can buy any of these components today for a reasonable price and do your own experiment.
Timothy Lord: To put a number on that, a reasonable price right now, to launch a whole balloon system, at least with components that you’ve assembled here is approximately what?
Jamel: So, without counting the cameras, I would say a thousand bucks, that’s still integrating the GPS locator, which is this module, and we can speak about that later if required, a flight computer, a kit, I would say is a thousand bucks. And most of it can be reused, because if you plan well, it will survive. This will survive, we have just a little scratch here. So after that if the cost of a balloon is sixty bucks, the helium something between eighty and two hundred bucks and you’re good to go.
Timothy Lord: Talk about why helium is such a variable cost.
Jamel: Oh, it’s because – you can't produce helium. So obviously you have to find it either from your petrol product or from the atmosphere. And anywhere there is a product there is a demand and often the price is pretty volatile.
Timothy Lord: Now, the actual components that we are talking about here, that are attached to your first of all let’s start with the frame, this is not a fully home-made frame.
Jamel: Absolutely.
Timothy Lord: Can you talk about that?
Jamel: Yeah, so that’s the key. That’s yet another example of this ability of the technology. So it was designed by a company, High Altitude Science with whom we worked to do this experiment. They do kits, they do their own computer. We can speak about that later too. They have everything that you can hope to buy to run this experiment. So, yeah this frame, roughly half an hour to mount it once you’ve received it. And it’s a very cool design, light weight, as you can see it’s a nice triangular shape so, when it lands on the ground, you are guaranteed that if you use one of these GPS locators, the positioning is upward, will always be upward, because if it’s the other way we would never get the position on your tracking and you will not know where it is.
Timothy Lord: It would be hard to imagine anyone sending up a balloon without a camera?
Jamel: Yes.
Timothy Lord: So luckily, they have included a nice camera mounting system over here.
Jamel: Yes, absolutely. So what we’re showing here right now is on the frame, you have those holes that’s pre-done to mount to the GoPro cameras for example. Absolutely and you know, the recommended GoPro camera is the H3 White edition, and I think it is around $200 probably less today. It’s very affordable. And assuming you recover, which should happen, you’ll reuse it of course.
Timothy Lord: Now, that’s on the low end of their camera line, why is that one recommended?
Jamel: It’s because it has a very cool design, where they reuse in terms of dissipation the CCD to read the battery pack. And the second biggest enemy which you run into in these balloons is the temperature. You don’t want your electronics to brownout, when you have such a voltage drop that stops working as expected, so that’s cool, so you can go higher, you trade off a little bit of resolution for the ground you will get some footage when it comes down.
Timothy Lord: Let’s talk about the flight computer, you know the flight computer here, so this is a preassembled one, so someone doesn’t have to program a single board computer.
Jamel: Absolutely.
Timothy Lord: So talk about what functions it has got?
Jamel: Sure, so this again is the same company who designed this—High Altitude Science. It was designed to run at negative 60-C, so it doesn’t need any protection. It has a sensor that you can see here. It’s connected to one of the two slots that are available. The only thing you have to do is to plug in your sensor, plug in the battery which I hope I will be able to show you without making your image. It’s just a Duracell lithium 9 volt battery and this one survives the temperature and height. As soon as you plug it in the program boots, detects the sensor and starts to login to an SD card, microSD card, very standard, again, off the shelf. It’s really the key word here.
Timothy Lord: And it features unlocked GPS.
Jamel: Yes, that’s a very good remark. So this company has the license to unlock firmware which means that the GPS data you will get above – you will get data above 60,000 feet, but if you’re using any of other off the shelf that actually you could mount in another board this one is a lot which means at above 60,000 feet you will not get data. Actually that’s a great plus, and again, off the shelf, you don’t have to mess with it.
Timothy Lord: Now, besides the actual cost, one thing that’s gotten better over the years is power efficiency, what kind of power does it take to run this how much weight in your battery systems, say?
Jamel: No that’s a good one because remember I told you that your second biggest enemy is the temperature, the first biggest enemy is the weight. When I designed our system here, I use this again, off the shelf you can buy it in – this one I got it from Adafruit, these battery cells and we use four of them. When they ran the benchmark, it run this entire system for end of an hour and that was way too much, because the full flight is about four hours, so by going to a much smaller battery pack like this one, but even this one is a little bit too much powerful I would say.
Timothy Lord: What’s the capacity of the one you used there?
Jamel: 11,000 milliamp-hour way too big and this one is 2,500 milliamp, and it can power this since this morning 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. in the afternoon it would still run, so that’s way too much too, and remember the lighter the battery the higher it can go and maybe break above the 97,000 feet. So that was a design mistake, I will make it again.
Timothy Lord: Do you feel that you will lose any of the magic of constructing such a thing when it all comes from a kit?
Jamel: I would say no. For me that is not. I was happyOne of the things I wanted to do is to capture an image of the curvature of the earth, and when I’d seen it you know I was really happy. It really allowed me to get it quickly. Sure, I was not alone, multiple people who could help, but you can do it. I think that what you’re trading in the exploration phase, where you have to learn everything yourself and do it yourself, versus one off the shelf set of kits—I take it. Especially because everybody did it already, right? So it’s not that we would not learn anything new, we will not discover anything new, but we can help kids and teachers to do this experiment very quickly and focus on learning.
Timothy Lord: You also don’t need to own your own laser cutter?
Jamel: Yeah, absolutely that’s another big saving right.
Timothy Lord: One question I have is that nowadays cellphones are cheap and powerful, what you get of this system component-wise and controls what kind of intelligence would you not have if you launched with an off the shelf cellphone as your controller, because the unlocked GPS maybe the first thing that I think?
Jamel: So that’s definitely one, because there are locked too – but you have – let me try to understand better your question, so if I put a phone that would be the idea and try to record that’s what it is?
Timothy Lord: They’re loaded with sensors, they’ve got a camera, they’ve got a built-in battery
Jamel: Oh I see, I’m not sure that they would survive negative 60 C that would be my second concern besides the obvious one you quoted which is the locking of the GPS positioning and, hey, you know what, it should be tried. It should be tried.
Timothy Lord: I’m sure it has somewhere.
Jamel: Yeah, probably it would be interesting to see the quality of the sensor, I know that when I discussed with other makers about this and even with High Altitude Science, one of the warnings they gave is the quality of the sensor you are using still needs to be high instead of low. So I’m not sure that maybe what is in the phone is designed to go that lower temperature for example, when we say is that, yeah, well I mean you can try just stick in there and see what it gets you back.
Timothy Lord: One other big improvement that has happened in these balloons into space is what happens afterwards, so let you ask you to close with talking about how you tracked it down, so you got some hardware for that.
Jamel: Absolutely. So one of the devices you can get is this spot tracking device it gives you every 10 minutes the position of your balloon and you can track it on real time on the web, so you have a webpage. The device itself is speaking of course the way you can have it, is off the shelf, around 200 bucks, the subscription is 150 bucks for year which goes down to 15 bucks for month roughly. It gives you a login, password and as soon as you start it you can track where your balloon is. So that’s one thing. It’s very useful because if your balloon bursts before way you expected you will know that and you will also know when it landed, so after the same position it’s very likely that this is where the balloon has landed, and then can use that coordinate to go out check what is there and then go out to do the recovery. However, as you said a lot of progress has been made and the main variable in this experiment is the jetstream. So that’s what will really define where your balloon will finally land starting from starting position. Now with websites you just go out you enter your coordinates some characteristic of your balloon and click button it will give you the predicted trajectory and now you can take that trace put it in to Google map and it will give you a very good idea of where your balloon will land. So that plus this it sort of a maximum coverage you could maybe get rid of the positioning device to save some money, but
Timothy Lord: You might waste it on gas later, driving around.
Jamel: Yes, absolutely that’s one thing, you hope that really the balloon landed there and nothing wrong happened before, which may always happen, right?
Timothy Lord: One final question, your balloon went about 60 miles and 97,000 feet.
Jamel: 97,000 feet which I think it’s above 18, or 19 miles.
Timothy Lord: How far did it traverse?
Jamel: Oh, yeah, the distance, horizontally, 60 miles yes, absolutely.
Timothy Lord: And how long a flight did you ____?
Jamel: Four hours, three for the ascent and one hour for the descent.
LOC (Score:3)
How high is that in libraries of congress?
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One, if you unroll it.
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Thanks. Left out the word "join." Not at my best today.
Ion Thruster (Score:2, Interesting)
10,000 MPH to get into orbit (Score:3, Informative)
Before getting out orbit, you'd need to get into orbit, which means moving sideways fast enough to compensate for the fact that you're falling. That's around 10,000 MPH, depending on altitude. Balloons don't go 10,000 MPH.
Depending on your definition of orbit, you also need to be high enough that the earth's atmosphere causes negligible drag, so you don't have to keep your engine running to maintain 10,000 MPH. Balloons don't go that high.
So orbit is out of question for two reasons. Can a balloon get
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bullshit, object with insufficient orbital velocity will fall. For circular orbit that is 7.7 km/sec, about 17,200 MPH. Elliptical orbits can be more interesting, with closest approach of about 93 miles (unpowered, less than 80 miles possible with powered), but those go even faster at perigee
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Re:Ion Thruster (Score:4, Interesting)
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JP Aerospace thought enough of the idea to study it and run computer simulations:
http://www.today.com/id/502538... [today.com]
About 2/3 down the page under the heading "Getting to Orbit"
""What if you flatten it out and give it a little bit of aerodynamic shape, and point it up a little bit so you have some of that thrust turned into lift?" Powell asked. "As you climb up, your drag is dropping, and now you're accelerating. The question comes, can you get aerodynamically clean enough, while still supporting the lift enou
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Getting into orbit isn't about height, it's about speed. The vast majority of the work an orbital rocket does is to get going fast enough - getting the height is pretty easy by comparison.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ [xkcd.com]
How high school budgets have changed... (Score:3)
This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount.
When I took engineering class in the early 1980's, our class had enough money to build hot air balloons from tissue paper that flew two blocks away into the surrounding neighborhoods. My balloon was called a "kludge" for flying higher and further than the others after my mother's cat got to it and I patched 300+ pinpoint holes. Kids today have it too easy.
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Living under the steel heel of the jackboot of the homeland is having it easy?
Are you already paranoid in your misbegotten youth?
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These people sell jackboots: http://www.epicmilitaria.com/p... [epicmilitaria.com]
That's a lot of who knowses (Score:1)
It's a cool balloon launch yeah, but joining Elon in outer space is kind of farfetched.
But who knows, after that you might invent the warp drive and embark on a 5 year mission to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no man has gone before.
Re: That's a lot of who knowses (Score:2)
You mean like in A.E. van Vogt's book, The Voyage of the Space Beagle -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org] -- ? It was old (published in 1950; I wasn't born until 1952) when I found it in the school library. My first piece of science fiction. I was in 3rd grade.
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joining Elon in outer space is kind of farfetched.
But suppose you launch an Estes Rocket from your balloon?
Lots of links (Score:1)
Launch is easy... recovery is the hard part (Score:3, Interesting)
Having been involved with two high-altitude (90,000 ft+) balloon launches, getting off the ground is the easy part. Getting the payload back is more difficult. One landed in Lake Michigan and was recovered, the other landed in a marsh and after 6 hours of searching, we still haven't recovered it. (Very difficult terrain to get through).
Getting into near space can be done for less than $1,000 pretty easily. It's a great educational experience, and loads of fun. Hopefully our next launch will land in a open grassy field.
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Actually the requirement was if it went that hight *and* was going fast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
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There is also SatNOGS... (Score:1)
http://satnogs.org/ [satnogs.org]
A thousand dollars? What the hell. (Score:2)
With one flight's worth of experience under my belt, I could put together a decent tracked payload with sen
Imperative headlines (Score:2)
Send Your Own Radiosonde 90,000 Feet Into the Sky
You heard the headline. Get cracking!
Why not spend $$$ on real science w/ NASA? (Score:2)
If you want to spend money on student research, why not invest in an actual NASA-sponsored project? Check out spaceweather.com [spaceweather.com] (toward the bottom):
HEY, THANKS! The students wish to thank Sander Geophysics Ltd (SGL) for sponsoring this flight. Note their logo in the upper right corner of the payload. SGL's generous contribution of $500 paid for the helium and other supplies necessary to get this research off the ground. Readers, if you would like to sponsor an upcoming flight and see your logo at the edge of space, please contact Dr. Tony Phillips to make arrangements.
Most interesting fight - M0xer-4 (Score:3)
Leo Bodnar launched a small balloon with a 11 gram payload. The payload is solar powered and has telemetry. Balloon hobbyists have been watching the flight since July 12th 2014. It is still flying. It has circled the earth (not at equator) about 5 times now I believe.
B-64/M0XER-4 Flight Web Page [leobodnar.com]
APRS Position [aprs.fi]
Simply amazing. The longest flight I can recall prior to this was one that was launched in California and made it to somewhere near the Mediterranean sea a few days later.
Used to do that twice a day... (Score:2)
Bah humbug. I used to send balloons (and radiosondes) to 30km+ high twice a day for work. A normal commercial weather balloon will regularly reach up to 35km high (~10hPa).