Spanish students beat Nasa with balloon and £56 camera

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Like something out of Heath Robinson, four Spanish teenagers equipped with nothing more than a £56 digital camera and a latex balloon captured stunning pictures of the Earth from the stratosphere.

As part of a school project, the budding scientists floated the camera-operated weather balloon 20 miles above the ground to capture the images.

Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasgull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel built the electronic sensor components from scratch and sent them to the edge of space using only a £43 latex balloon.

The students from the IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia, northeast Spain, took atmospheric readings and photographs as the balloon floated into space.

You can read more here

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5939123.ece

Who wants to have a go...bagsy holding onto the balloon...:-)
 
I noticed they use a Nikon didn't they want to risk their prized Canon??
 
Keenbfb said:
I noticed they use a Nikon didn't they want to risk their prized Canon??
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:lol:

Its amazing what some people think of doing, this would be a fun project in general :D
 
Keenbfb said:
I noticed they use a Nikon didn't they want to risk their prized Canon??
Click to expand...

It was actually their second attempt. They tried it with a canon first time but it didn't work so they sent something reliable up. :woot:
 
cue hundreds of schools/universities letting off baloons with cameras on them ;)
 
cowasaki said:
It was actually their second attempt. They tried it with a canon first time but it didn't work so they sent something reliable up. :woot:
Click to expand...

They had to use a Nikon.....wouldnt have seen a thing with a Canon in such low light :bonk:

Jay. :D
 
not another Canon vs Nikon drag :P.
They certainly did 'beat' NASA in terms of such a low budget for their project!!
 
not another Canon vs Nikon drag :P.
They certainly did 'beat' NASA in terms of such a low budget for their project!!
 
I'm waiting for hundreds of cameras to be falling out of the sky! Couldn't have been that cheap, the tracking system to find the kit once it had descended must have cost a bit?
 
>>Couldn't have been that cheap, the tracking system to find the kit once it had descended must have cost a bit?

If they built the thing themselves, GPS receiver chips are cheap (even kits for GPS receivers are cheap), then all you have to do is arrange a phone or a lowish powered transmitter to transmit the lat/long information - which would mean you can get to within 10 metres of the kit... use of their standard issue MKI Eyeballs probably helped at that point.

Much more tricky would be sorting out the rest of the telemetry, though with a PIC that should be possible, and working out how to make everything as light as possible. Oh and, of course, the small matter of persuading the local Guardia Civil that you were not actually doing anything that they should worry about :)

B
 
I guess its all good fun until it gets sucked into a jet engine :)
 
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