Monthly Archive for August, 2011

Geoff eats the Twinkie from space :)

We sent up a Twinkie and a marshmallow on the top of the payload capsule to see what would happen to them at 90,000 feet altitude.
Well, as you may have guessed, other than a semi-frozen filling, nothing happened to the Twinkie at all! The marshmallow did expand a bit but also tasted “normal” 🙂

CHDK photos from the Canon G9

Here are some photos from the Canon G9 that was poking out of the payload.
The G9 was running the CHDK intervalometer script that I wrote a while back…

More high altitude balloon data updates

I spent some one on one time getting to know MS Excel’s VLOOKUP function in order to merge the Arduino temperature data points with the APRS altitude and speed data and then created an interactive graph with the results using Google Docs – pretty interesting stuff:

Balloon flight path

Here is a screen shot of the flight data… I’ll post a Google Earth KML file later when I figure out how to generate it from the raw telemetry data.

Note the few minutes spent falling over the Pacific Ocean!

cloud blanket

Some initial data – high altitude balloon temperature graph.

The Arduino worked perfectly and took 5755 temperature readings inside and outside the capsule.
The capsule was not air tight but still acted as a pretty good buffer for the internal air temperature.

First HAPPy photo from near space!

Our first photo from space 🙂  Taken around 70,000 feet looking towards Thousand Oaks.

BALLOON RECOVERED!!!!!!!!!!!

We just got the balloon back. It landed on a soft patch of grass. We will post raw video and pics ASAP with an edited video coming soon. Stay tuned as more content is released. We also saw it land and a partner might have videoed the land

Balloon is falling!!!!!!

we are retrieving it now

We just left the launch site

we are on the move tracking the balloon. Keep an eye on Twitter and après.fi the tracking call sign is kd0pfn.