Posted on September 23, 2009 - Filed Under General, Humor, Technology
Hi Oz!
I thought you'd like this story. This young man apparently keeps coming up with new ideas, (like rafting down the Charles River on a raft made of bottles). However, this particular idea I thought might interest you.
He launched a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler.
Pretty whacky idea, huh?
All of the parts they used are commonly available. Yeh and Lee bought a Canon camera on eBay and then fastened it inside a Styrofoam cooler. A hole poked in the side of the container let the camera lens gaze out into space, and they attached a Motorola Boost cell phone to the camera so it would send GPS coordinates back to Earth.
A wireless router was hooked up to the mobile phone to give it the extra antenna power needed to send the coordinates down. And the students taped a hand warmer -- the kind skiers put in their gloves -- to the mobile phone's battery so it wouldn't freeze.
The plan seemed simple enough -- at least to the MIT students. They would fill a spherical weather balloon, available online, with helium and float the entire cooler-camera-cell-phone apparatus high into the atmosphere.
When the balloon had traveled about 17 miles up, air pressure would cause it to pop, and a parachute dangling from the side of the cooler would lower the contraption back to Earth. Then the GPS in the phone would tell them where to find their camera, which they set, using open-source software, to take photos every 5 seconds.
Yeh and Lee knew that wind would change their contraption's course after launch, so they went on a free Web site to try to calculate roughly where the balloon would go. After some consideration, they decided to launch the balloon from a field near a warehouse in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. That was far enough from the coast, they hoped, to avoid sending the balloon and the camera into metro Boston or the Atlantic Ocean.
But, not quite sure of the calculations, they pasted this note on the side of the cooler just in case: "If found, please call [their phone number]. ... Material contents are 100% safe/non-toxic/non-flammable and are part of a student science project. $40 reward."
They rented a Zipcar, loaded up the cooler and left their apartments that night. After adding one person to the team -- a new student Lee had met at MIT orientation -- they drove 60 miles inland and slept on the ground at a parking lot, the car and their big idea waiting beside them.
More on the details of their launch ยป HERE Comments
