Teens take pictures of space with balloon, Nikon Coolpix camera
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Mar 20th 2009 12:23PM
posted Mar 20th 2009 12:23PM
The closest most of us 'round here will ever get to outer space is blogging about the Lunar X Prize, so our inner astronauts get rather giddy any time an amateur makes it to the cusp of the gravity well. The above photos were taken by the Meteotek team, a teacher and his four students from the IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia, Spain. The group designed and launched a balloon kitted out with a Nikon Coolpix and custom built electronics, intending to get some shots at 30,000 feet. Well exceeding their expectations, the $80 digicam (held aloft by a $60 latex balloon) reached over 100,000 feet, at which point it lost inflation and fell to the earth. As the balloon rose, the team was able to map its progress using Google Earth via the craft's on-board radio receiver. After it fell back to earth, the group "travelled 10km to find the sensors and photographic card," said one of the students, "which was still emitting its signal, even though it had been exposed to the most extreme conditions."
[Via Switched]
[Via Switched]
Try launching that in America and see how fast you end up in Gitmo as a terrorist.
Precisely what I was thinking
If it was a live feed from the camera, you could at least see the jets coming to escort you away. :)
People do it all the time, and they launch homemade rockets too, don't let the media get you into a state of mind where you start to fear everything and think nothing is allowed.
Of course what WOULD happen in the US is that you would get a million people swearing they saw an UFO and it abducted them and now they have superpowers, but that's another story.
Oh and additionally please follow the news a bit and note that obama is closing the quantanamo bay torture camp.
I remember seeing a very similar project in Ontario,Canada a year or two ago.
Found it... they even have some video. Their balloon seem to be getting thrown around a lot though:
http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/
This happened to work out well, but since you can't control the fall trajectory you run the risk of actually being a terrorist if your camera ends up falling to earth at terminal velocity and kills a bus driver or something.
And there's also the rather unlikely possibility that when you send your balloon up to airplane flying altitudes that your balloon ends up in someone's turbines. So you'd have to make sure that your balloon won't be pushed by winds off into someone's flight trajectory.
Pssh, America? I launched a KAP rig in Kenya and got myself hauled away by a big group of security guys working for the Kenya Airports Authority. They drove up in a couple of trucks, and were like, "Get in." Apparently you're not allowed to fly a kite within 30 km of an airport, which by their reckoning is anywhere in Nairobi. Apparently model rockets are also similarly banned. They let me go, but that probably had something to do with me being an American. International incidents are bad for the tourism business I guess.
Wow, the coolest thing I ever did w/ my teachers was pack an egg in bubble wrap and try to get it to survive a drop from the roof of the school. That's freaking awesome!
Yeah, that kicks major ass!
Did it survive?
Egg drops are fun. We did one when I was in school. The cool part was one of the kids dad is a pilot. Se he dropped the ones that survived the roof from 100 feet. None of them survived that one, but I think it was a combination of height and speed.
@Rioryan:
"...travelled 10km to find the sensors and photographic card, which was still emitting its signal, even though it had been exposed to the most extreme conditions."
And... You're seeing pictures, no? :)
Shadyman:
I was talking about Chris Are's egg.
"try to get it to survive a drop from the roof"
And... You're reading comments before you reply to them, no? :)
Yeah, I did the old 'let's see if an egg will survive impact' experiment at school with my teacher.
Except that it was after school. And the egg wasn't wrapped in plastic. And the teacher was already driving away.
SAME HERE LOL
I know this is cool and all, but it has been all over the net and back in the past few days.
Really? That's so awesome that you saw it before a bunch of other people. You must get all the chicks, them being like, "Hey, that's the guy that read that camera space article before anyone else on Engadget.".
@Frag
Fuck that is the funniest thing I have read all day.... even though it is only 9:45am west coast
Still laughing out loud.
Why is Engadget wasting all of Kobutah's time? Don't you know he has better things to do than read news he's already read?
Agreed, epic win Frag.
lmao @ frag
Kob - what a douche!
Kool~~~
NERD ALERT
But seriously... that is quite remarkable...
I wonder if Nikon will use this..
'Nikon works even if you suffocate to death'
I'm sure Nikon is very happy
And look how they fancied it up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meteotek08/2638101183/sizes/l/in/set-72157614847488964/
Spongebob the nikon
welcome to 2008
?
Dude, check your computer clock, I think it's a little behind.
Wow...that's amazing!
Thats Freaking sweet i want one.... :-D
How did they recover the camera? I've been following this for a few days and they mention they recovered the pic from the camera afterwards.... Did it have a parachute or did the sift through the remains of a project that came back down at terminal velocity?
Good question, i too want to known.
I dont know about them, but for our project the payload was equipped with a parachute which deployed when the balloon popped, gps and a radio. The altitude, gps location, etc were read over the radio with a text-to-speech chip (as well as DTMF tones), and we monitored its location with a giant antenna from the ground. We followed it with cars and used directional antenna's to hone in on a different signal once it was on the ground. We flew 2 balloons that day, one of which we were able to find ourselves. The other one was found by a hunter ~8 months later, but we had thought to put contact information all over the payload as well as to offer a reward for returning it - so we got the second one back that way.
@Pete: they attached a parachute to the system. According to their comments, they bought it at www.the-rocketman.com
If you're interested you can check their flickr set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meteotek08/2577051309/
You can gather more information in the project site: http://teslabs.com/meteotek08/ I'm afraid it's written in Catalan, but you can use the Google Translator page as well ;-)
greetings from Barcelona!! :-D
I actually did this for my earth and space sciences class (ESS 205) at the University of Washington last year... We got up to 36km I believe. Awesome project because we had limits (1 pound for each 4 person group's module, $50 limit for equipment), and we had to create all the electronics from raw components, so we learned about that and space :).
Pics here: http://flash3.ess.washington.edu/ess205
One cool my my group got: http://flash3.ess.washington.edu/ess205/2GB_chip/100MEDIA/IMG_0093.JPG
You have to stop embarrassing NASA like that, or you could get into real trouble!
There is real federal money at stake here. You can't go doing things like this where you only spend a few hundred dollars and get results!
I love the last line in the article in the read link.
"The pupils' incredible school science project has already caught the attention of the University of Wyoming in the US."
NO WAI WYOMING!??!
@Daniel
They may be a bit behind the times, but they give a free college education to students with a 2.5GPA or better. They also must graduate from a Wyoming high school. However, if they offer classes that do this type of project they may be able to increase their enrollment from out of state as well. I'm pretty sure they are looking for anything to increase enrollment right now.
There must have been some favorable winds. It seems like if you go that high up, the package could end up more than 10 km away.
Yeah that part of the story is perplexing, since I'm told there are constant streams of wind current at various altitudes with speed of up to 200KM/h.
Actually the air is pretty darn calm after you get up about 10km...
You go through plenty of layers to get there though right?
While the baloon is floating up, the earth didn't stand still.
In an unrelated news, North Korean leader vows revenge after American attempt at his life via falling object from the sky.
Your attempt at humor is ruined by the fact that you didn't RTFA. Unless "Catalonia, Spain" is now part of the US.
Of course it is. The US owns the whole world. Actually, there are no countries outside of the US. It's just the US in this world.
I don't get it. How does this story relate to the iPhone?
LMFAO.
agreed, agreed, agreed.
LMFAO!
They obviously used Google Earth on Iphones to locate the balloon - Im looking forward to enjoying three articles (at least) about this.
What a solid endorsement for Nikon!
They probably had to apologise to Apple via signed letter for not covering the iPhone 3.0 upgrade in this article.
Ashton approves of the use of a coolpix for this project.
you can do all this with a little cash and some Parallax BASIC stamps. http://www.parallax.com/
they even have a "how to" on their site...it's really not that difficult...just time and some cash.
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/567/Default.aspx
kudos to the poster who made his own components.
Sweet, thanks for the links.
PIC>Parallax
The thing I love about this sort of thing is the huge amounts of money NASA etc spend trying to get anything anywhere near space.
Getting something to float up into the upper atmosphere and getting something to orbit around the planet are completely different tasks. The latter involving a metric ton more energy than the former.
@ size
I would have to agree with you. If a government agency tried to do the same thing it would of cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars knowing that in the end the balloon would come crashing down to earth and be destroyed.
Sure, NASA may spend $1 million for a project... but they are also putting 1 ton of payload up for 100 days at a time and that price includes the payload..
Nikon should get them to do their advertising. "Nikon. Send into space without a protection. Returned safe with photos."
I did this at college in a class sponsored by NASA...it's pretty cool and a lot of kids do it around the states. We used a film camera (disposables) though since it was cheaper...
Good thing there weren't any plane engines for those balloons to get sucked into, that would have been catastrophic. Awesome project though.
We coordinated with air traffic control, and had very specific weight and size limits for exactly that reason :)
As I recall balloons in the US require to have radar reflectors attached, am I correct or did I get misinformed there? But I also read that the FAA want to do away with cumbersome RADAR based traffic control and go with a GPS based system, I guess you'd need to attach a heavy transponder in the future.
Seems kind of dangerous for pilots to be hitting a camera at 30,000 feet.
For this they'll get an A in science, scolding for destroying dad's digicam
tho if it was my kid I'd sell/rent him to NASA
wow that sounded really bad reading it out loud, sry
Do not have children.
Some scientist did something similar, but sending up his (weather sealed) Pentax DSLR, which still works. But yeah, very nice for a few students. Though they obviously didn't have a lot of confidence in their project.
Students + balloons can do lots of cool stuff. We did a Sky View competition, which I believe it was funded by NASA partially (it has been... wow 14 years or so), though our goal wasn't getting into space. Using a balloon + a home made servo (later a camera with a timer that fired every 30 seconds), infrared film, and some fancy (at the time) photo colorization on the computer we could map out prairie dog tunnels from a thousand feet or so. Every year, our teacher and her weather group of folks, would launch a balloon like these kids did, but they certainly traveled more than 10km. That was part of the fun for them, the chase.
This is some testimony for Nikon.
They ought to make this a commercial.
just what the world needs another commercial
A school in Phoenix, AZ did something like this last year. Just so you know it is possible to do this in the good ol' USA as well. It just requires some paperwork with the FAA.
http://www.uat.edu/whatshappening/default.asp?action=1&id=474&target_month=10&target_year=2008
I guess I didn't read all the comments and missed the one in Washington as well.
Cheers!
Keep in mind these are a bunch of HIGH-SCHOOL kids. IES La Bisbal is a high school. These kids are like 16.
Damn, awesome!
Way cool.
We need more teachers like this.
It only takes one project like this to turn a kids life around and get them into tech.
http://www.renogeek.com
This really is fantastic :D
One of them runs Ubuntu on the laptop.
I'm confused/doubting this for some reason. It seems almost impossible that the camera came down only 10km away. At those altitudes it would have been pushed hundreds of miles away by the jet stream, would it not??? Perhaps theres something I'm not ocnsidering, but it seems a little suspect to me...
Something similar has been done with a Pentax K10D (see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arena5/2659744049/). I think this is really testament to how well a DigiCam survives in some extreme conditions.
"Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere....
....
....Created by the four students under the guidance of teacher Jordi Fanals Oriol, the budding scientists, all aged 18-19, followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth."
I'm working with a group at my school to launch a rocket from a balloon at around 100,000 feet, and I have another project going with one of my classes where we are going to launch a balloon with a camera and temperature probes just like this group
Wow, my project always was to jump as high as I could and try and measure that, yea it sucked
I don't understand the comment
"cusp of the gravity well."
Earths gravity extends for 1000's of miles, this kids did not send this camera high enough to reduce gravity even to 90% of what it is on ground level.