My best friend since Kindergarten is a High School teacher and he put together a project to send a weather balloon up into the sky.
He fitted it with three GoPro video cameras, one of which took a photo every second. Two were facing down on either side of the package at about 15 degrees, and the other pointed straight up. It was also fitted with an arduino board that recorded things like temperature, speed, altitude and what-not. Also connected was a Spot device, which sent out a GPS ping every 10 minutes.
He used some program on Google Earth to be able to forecast the trajectory and sure enough, it proved accurate.
Here is early flight data:
The craft ultimately reached over 94,000 feet around 80+ minutes into the flight, where the balloon finally burst.
The parachute didn't open completely (maybe due to an oversight) and so it came down earlier than projected. It didn't carry as far to the East.
The views were pretty spectacular.
Here's a shot from the upwards facing camera. Notice how you can see the Earth in the background? That's because it's going 140 miles per hour right here, mostly laterally!
Here's a screen cap from around the moment the balloon finally burst. Epic shot.
Three carbon fiber rods were built in a triangle shape to help the package (hopefully) land facing up. Attached was the school mascot.
This image is during the descent. That's Bumping Lake in the near distance and at the bottom center of the shot is a scree field where the craft finally landed. It was about 100 yards tall and a few hundred yards long, and about a 45 degree angle. If you were to look on google maps or similar, you would see that this is just about the only open area with no trees in it for miles and miles in any direction. There's a road that goes around the lake and we followed it to the end and only had to walk through the woods for about 10 minutes to reach the scree field. It's roughly equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack to have landed here. We got extremely lucky because access to other areas near here would have been very tricky, let alone all the trees that it could have landed in!
This shot was taken near the top of the flight, and what's interesting here is you can actually see where it's going to land. That's Bumping Lake again in this shot... at higher res, if you zoom in you can even see the tiny little scree field.
Here's what the craft looks like (yes, there were about 9 intrepid lego men on there, including one of Ryan's originals from the 70's, which we recovered. Several lost half their bodies which weren't all recovered on the scree):
Notice the R2 unit. He was working overtime on this flight, I'm sure.
This shot shows the hand made radar reflector, which is a requirement for doing something like this. Notice also the drag chute and how the lanyard clasp is right up near the top there, preventing it from opening completely.
This shot shows the landscape where it was recovered. As you can see, we hit a bullseye miracle on this landing. It could have been anywhere else and we probably wouldn't be looking at these pictures right now.
Final flight path data here:
Here's the landing spot:
All in all, it was a great day and we were ecstatic that we were able to make this recovery, given the territory it came down in. The flight data will be handed off to the math department, and of course the kids will have a lot of great pictures and videos to pore over to put together a nice presentation for their school. This was a fun thing to do, and it's great to think that these kinds of adventures are possible in this day and age. Hope you enjoyed this!
Fun facts --
Altitude: 94,510
Top Speed: 143 MPH
Lowest Temperature: -50 degrees
