REVscene Automotive Forum - $150 Space Camera

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$150 Space Camera

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/...-money-budget?

Quote:

The $150 Space Camera.

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. 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, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

Launch

Two weeks ago, on Sept. 2, at the leisurely post-breakfast hour of 11:45 a.m., the balloon was launched from Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Lee and Yeh took a road trip in order to stop prevailing winds from taking the balloon out onto the Atlantic, and checked in on the University of Wisconsin’s balloon trajectory website to estimate the landing site.

Because of spotty cellphone coverage in central Massachusetts, it was important to keep the rig in the center of the state so it could be found upon landing. 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 Photographs

The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet. The Canon was hacked with the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon’s cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8-GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight.

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.

What is most astonishing about this launch, named Project Icarus, is that anyone could do it. The budget is so small as to be almost nonexistent (the guys slept in their car the night before the launch to save money), so that even if everything went wrong, a second, third or fourth attempt would be easy. All it took was a grand idea and an afternoon poking around the hardware store.

The project website has few details on how the balloon was put together — but the students say they will be selling step-by-step instructions for $150 soon. That means you will soon be able to launch your own balloon for just $300 — $150 for the instructions and $150 for the parts.

Project Icarus page [1337 Arts]

Photo credit: 1337 Arts/Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/ga...mb-660x495.jpg

See? This is what happens when young, inquisitive minds stop spending valuable time on forums like this..........

Imagine what this world would be like if the youth of today got off their Nintendos and computers.

Nah......... Way more fun playing WOW.

Interesting, I can see a lot of people doing this. :lol

rs space photoshoot anybody?

that's pretty neat, but if you release one from here it'll probably land in the ocean, lol.

lol thats pretty cool

who wants to do it I'm in.

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Originally Posted by 89blkcivic (Post 6594333)

with out RS, our life would have no meaning

screw that, I want to be that dude who saw the curvature of the earth first hand on a weather balloon

you would have to do this in like Alberta or something..

that is amazing...
and it's nice to see that they were asian =D

They did it in Massacheutsas guys... thats like doing it here

but they're lucky it didn't hit anyone on the head on its way down... a camera filled beer cooler dropping from 93,000 feet up smacking someone in the head is not going to be pretty

I can't wait to see the photo footage when compiled together into a video!

Quote:

Originally Posted by StylinRed (Post 6595817)

never thought of that... that could be a HUGE lawsuit eh?

:bowdown: MIT

Start worrying about random beer coolers falling outta the sky now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mx703 (Post 6595659)

you would have to do this in like Alberta or something..

that is amazing...
and it's nice to see that they were asian =D

Watch Hollywood make a movie out of this a few years from now.
Casting two white guys. "Based on a true story"

^ like dragonball....