Some decisions are easier than others, like whether to spend your pocket money on beer or on a totally awesome space shot—provided the cost is the same.
MIT students Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh opted for the latter when they decided to send a camera into space.
Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.
Of course, this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find it when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking.
On Sept. 2, at 11:45 a.m., the balloon was launched from Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Lee and Yeh took a road trip to the center of the state (sleeping in their car to save money) in order to prevent prevailing winds from taking the balloon out onto the Atlantic. Due to spotty cellphone coverage in central Massachusetts, it was important the landing occur in the center of the state so it could be tracked and found. Light winds meant the guys got lucky and, although the cellphone’s external antenna was buried upon landing, the fix they got as the balloon was coming down was close enough.
The picture you see above was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took 40 minutes to come back to Earth.
All it took was a grand idea and an afternoon poking around the hardware store.
Total cost for the project, including duct tape? $148. Priceless.
SOURCE: WIRED.com
Posted on September 15th, 2009 at 8:00 pm by Lin McNulty
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