Last week we introduced you to the High Altitude Balloon experiment. The project is getting closer to completion, watch the video to see the progress.
“Make: is going to space.Have you ever wanted to go up into space? Well, you don’t have to try and win a golden ticket, be a millionaire, or an astronaut… you can send your own payload into space!
In this Make: Video Podcast, you’ll learn all the details of how to put a weather balloon up into space! The weather balloon will make it up to about 100,000 feet. That’s almost 20 miles up and more than twice the height of being in an airplane. It’s high enough that the sky is black and you can see the curvature of the earth.
Why would we want to send a package into space? To take pictures and temperature readings of course! We’ll be using the Make: Controller to boss around 4 canon sd cameras set up to take a spectacular panoramic picture every 7 seconds! It will also have thermistors on it to measure the temperature as it goes up?
We’ll be tracking it with two different systems. The primary system is a gps module connected to a tinytrak which makes the gps data into aprs ham radio packets and then sends them out on 144.39mhz which will get picked up by our receivers and repeaters and then routed to the internet where anyone can watch on google maps and earth in real time!”
Via: Make
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Do you think the electronics will be able to withstand -50 degrees F? Proably colder. Thats how cold it gets up there. Crystal osc. may drift, caps values changes.. Frost on lenses can be a problem too. Perhaps you should test the thing in a freezer..
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I think they probably thought of that. After all, they built a high altitude balloon.
You do however, have a most excellent point. Maybe a coating on the lenses?
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This absolutely beautiful. I think it will be great to see the fruits from this project once its completed.