High-altitude balloon flight

[Chris Tomkins-Tinch]

We could instrument and launch a high-altitude balloon.

Here's a page describing how one team did it:
http://hibal.org/missions/apteryx/

[Timothy Miller]

Awesome :)

[AntiTree]

Cool - Could we do some kind of aerial photography while it's up there?

[Christopher Tomkins-Tinch]

We certainly could, if we use a light enough camera and have a way to control it remotely (or otherwise have it snap shots). The total instrument package must be <4lbs to launch a balloon without an FAA permit. A PIC microcontroller and a transistor could probably do the job.

Cheap cameras appear on Craigslist all the time. I'm sure we could find one that would be suitable.

The camera could be the primary focus of the project, though we'd also probably want some way to log location (GPS) and signal back so we could retrieve the camera. 

Maybe we could do something clever with the cameras, like mount several, fire them in unison, and get a panoramic view with every shot. 

Chris

--

Christopher H. Tomkins-Tinch

Sent from my mobile phone; sorry for any tpyos.

http://www.christomkinstinch.com

tomk...@gmail.com

cht...@rit.edu

845.392.0468

[Nathan McCorkle]

This sounds like we need to get the CMOS/CCD chips and put together a
controller board... I think this is easily within reach if we really
want to do it. I think there is a lot of motivation to do this too,
I've never heard of someone on campus at RIT doing something with a
custom designed pano-camera weatherballoon. Maybe have an SD card or
NAND memory chip per camera, the gigabytes are cheap these days.

How long of average flight time would this thing potentially be? Is it
going to float out to sea before we could collect the memory chips and
other tech? Is there a way to programmatically have it
deflate/descend?

--
Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics

[Michael D'Angelo]

look up chdk for canon cameras. you are also going to need to need a battery warmer and a way to track your balloon. I sent up a balloon with a camera two years ago.

[Christopher Tomkins-Tinch]

We could certainly build our own camera package, but it might be better to take advantage of the economy of scale that already exists around consumer digital cameras--we're not likely going to beat their prices.  Maybe we could take consumer cameras out of their plastic enclosures to reduce weight (although it might be beneficial for durability to retain the cases).

As for average flight time: according to the page I linked to earlier, "the balloon traveled to an altitude of roughly 90,000 ft over a period of about 5 hours."  That's a pretty long flight, even if it was a good bit lower than the Kármán line (the "edge of space"--an altitude of 62.1 miles).  Programmatic deflation/descention is a cool idea.  How do you think we could do that?

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Christopher H. Tomkins-Tinch
RIT Imaging Science (BS 2011)
http://www.christomkinstinch.com
tomk...@gmail.com
cht...@rit.edu