Students' balloon, camera rise 17.5 miles, photograph Earth
11:21 PM Sun, Sep 13, 2009 | Permalink
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Projo Subterranean Homepage NewsBottom-up journalism from the pros: News, tech and culture by Sheila Lennon |
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Pictures from space for $150 is the headline at Hack a Day. This is very cool: Ever wanted to be able to launch a balloon into space, track its location via GPS, take some photographs of the curvature of the earth, and recover the balloon, all for the low low cost of $150? [Oliver Yeh] sent in his teams project, Icarus, which does just that. The group of MIT students found that they could use a weather balloon filled with helium to reach heights of around 20 miles above the earth; their particular balloon achieved 93,000 feet (17.5 miles). Then, utilizing only off the shelf components with no soldering, conjured up a GPS tracker using a Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone. They then used a Canon A470 loaded with the chdk open source firmware to take pictures. After seeing the results of their launch, the team hopes that this could rejuvenate interests in science and the arts. Flight Pictures This is just the sort of merger of art and tech that will be going on this week at Maker Faire RI. They aim to put the tools in your hands long enough to ignite a new idea. My next post will be about that. |
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