So, this weekend i sent some crap into space...

[LegumeOfTerror]

or pretty damn close. I'm part of a team representing my school in the University Nanosatellite Program, and myself and three other were sent to Boulder, Colorado to take part in a workshop. we built and programmed a basic board with pressure, temperature, and XYZ rotation sensors and hacked a digital camera. the camera was reprogrammed to take pictures at certain intervals during the flight. that was all packed in a foam board box with batteries, a resistance heater, and lined with insulation. it was attached to a weather balloon and launched. we then got in a convoy of trucks with tracking equipment and chased them down. it ended up going up 85,000 feet and landing 50 or so miles away. a couple of hours later we recovered it and got a few hundred pictures back. also attached via paperclip to the line was a lego man, who somehow survived. here are some of the pics:

[LegumeOfTerror]

[behemoth]

Very cool.

[MANN]

That is awesome. I am assuming that the camera was still good when you got it back? (I would think if a lego man could make it so could a camera)

[Thordic]

Wow thats awesome. Going to publish all the pics somewhere?

[vf-xx]

Picassa gallery!!!

Nice job tho. LEGOS in Space!!! Nifty to see the curvature of the Earth in some of those.

[Dark Side]

Nifty to see the curvature of the Earth in some of those.

I was thinking the same thing. You did get it close didn't you.

[LegumeOfTerror]

That is awesome. I am assuming that the camera was still good when you got it back? (I would think if a lego man could make it so could a camera)

yes, but we bypassed the power switch and gave it new firmware, so unless we undid everything it just takes pictures until it is out of memory. we got close to 500 pictures back, 100 or so of which were of the grass where it landed. i will have to see about posting all of the pictures.

[Bolter]

I would love to see more! Totally awesome!

[aaronlecain]

any pictures of the rig?

[LegumeOfTerror]

Our Payload:



The balloon:



Out payload going up with the others:

[aaronlecain]

so there were a bunch of camera boxes? different schools or something?

[DevilMan]

Out of curiosity.... why didn't you put a small chute on the payload??? Tied off to the balloon or some other part so that it would deploy on descent???

I remember doing this while in the navy our weather watchers would launch em and get the data feed from it as it went up and as it came down... but we didn't recover what we sent up... it just went for a visit to ole davy's locker...

DM

[LegumeOfTerror]

Out of curiosity.... why didn't you put a small chute on the payload??? Tied off to the balloon or some other part so that it would deploy on descent???

I remember doing this while in the navy our weather watchers would launch em and get the data feed from it as it went up and as it came down... but we didn't recover what we sent up... it just went for a visit to ole davy's locker...

DM

the orange thing at the top before the balloon is the parachute, we recovered the payloads. there were people from 12 schools at the workshop, and they each built a payload.

[paintball72]

very cool