Teenager floats £30 camera into space to capture curvature of Earth

[dipsydoodle]

They look like they could be the latest images taken from a multi-million pound NASA satellite but these stunning snaps were actually taken from a £30 camera bought off eBay by a teenager.

Adam Cudworth, 19, managed to capture these incredible views of the earth from space using little more than a balloon and his second-hand camera.

And while NASA spends hundreds of millions of pounds each year on high tech satellites Adam, whose scientific background consists of only a Physics A-Level, achieved his incredible feat - on a £200 budget.

The student spent 40 hours working on a home-made device consisting of a box containing a GPS, radio and microprocessor - which soared to an incredible height of 110,210 ft (33,592m) when he released it last Thursday.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9531419/Teenager-floats-30-camera-into-space-to-capture-curvature-of-Earth.html

[LeftofObama]

1. Now that's impressive! n/t

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Very cool!

[drm604]

3. This article tries to give the impression that this young man has somehow shown NASA up

by doing what they do but on a £200 budget.

What it fails to mention is that NASA satellites can target precisely what they want to photograph, can transmit those photos to earth via radio, and can remain in orbit and continue to do this for decades.

It also doesn't point out the fact that he's taking advantage of a GPS satellite system that NASA and the military spent billions to design and put into place. So the real cost of what he did should include that.

[DreWId]

10. What are you saying about that GPS technology?

That he didn't built that?

[zbdent]

4. a thirty pound camera? Damn, for something that heavy, it's tiny!

[GiveMeFreedom]

7. Har Har

Yuk yuk, Wink wink.

[dipsydoodle]

8. It was your response

which helped me grasp that.

[caraher]

5. There are lots of hobbyists doing this

We send up similar balloons at our school, except we tend to fly experiments in addition to cameras. Still, good for him.

[LunaSea]

11. Yes, but are you doing it with this much style?

On Wednesday Sept. 5th a group of California high school students celebrated the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1 in an unusual way: They launched a rubber chicken. The popular NASA mascot Camilla traveled to the top of our planet's atmosphere on board a suborbital helium balloon. Here is a snapshot from an altitude of approximately 120,000 feet:

Camilla is wearing headphones. Why? Because she's listening to the Golden iPod, the modern-day successor to the Golden Records bolted to the side of the Voyager probes. The students are updating the Golden Records with 21st-century content that the students would like to send into the cosmos. This was just a test flight; in 2013, they hope to launch the Golden iPod into Earth orbit onboard a CubeSat they are building.

At the apex of the Sept. 5th suborbital flight, the helium balloon popped as planned and Camilla parachuted back to Earth. The students, who call their group "Earth to Sky," recovered Camilla and the Golden iPod from a remote landing site in the Nevada wilderness on Sept. 6th. Now they are all enjoying music that has been to the doorstep of space itself.

[tclambert]

6. I think Penn and Teller did a stunt like this on their show

"Penn and Teller Tell a Lie." If I remember right, they sent action figure versions of themselves on a pizza box with a video camera and GPS all attached to a weather balloon up to the "edge of space." And that one was not the lie.

[malaise]

9. Very cool indeed

Rec