Teens take pictures of space with balloon, Nikon Coolpix camera
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted March 20th 2009 12:23PM
posted March 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]
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.