Welcome to space.1337arts.com — Project Icarus, home of the original $150 near-space launch!
UPDATE: 8/7/10 We have created a forum. If you have questions, comments, or just want to show your near-space launch, post HERE!
UPDATE: 5/12/10 Check out grassrootsmapping.org! We’re helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years.
UPDATE: 10/30/09: Want to do it yourself? Visit GUIDE, a compilation of detailed information regarding what we did for our launch.
Click Here for archive of updates
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***CAUTION/DISCLAIMER: Launching things into the stratosphere can be DANGEROUS! Please contact the FAA before trying any launches (even if they are under 4 lbs.) to make sure your vehicle won’t be entering restricted airspace and PLEASE check the University of Wyoming’sBalloon Trajectory Predictor(or a similar website) to make sure you balloon won’t be landing in the city/a populated area where it might cause significant damage. Also, be sure to test your balloon’s terminal velocity for descent before launching. We tested our parachute by putting eggs inside of our styrofoam box and tossing the box off of a 5 story building. We were not satisfied with the landing speed of our box until the eggs did not break upon the box’s impact.
About Project Icarus
We are a group of MIT students seeking to share the artistic aspects of science with others. On Sept. 2, 2009, we launched a digital camera into near-space to take photographs of the earth from high up above. (see “Flight”)
Several groups have accomplished similar feats (see “Other Launches”), but as far we know, we are the first group ever to:
(1) Complete such a launch on a budget of $150 total. All of our supplies (including camera, GPS tracking, weather balloon, and helium) were purchased for less than a grand total of $150.
(2) Create a launch vehicle without the use of any electronic hacking. We used off-the-shelf items exclusively (i.e., no electronic chips or soldering) to create our launch vehicle.
The results were fantastic. Our ultra low-budget balloon went 17.5 miles high into the uppermost parts of the stratosphere and returned 5 hours later. We tracked the device with GPS and found it some 20 miles away from the launch site.
Check us out on CNN, FOX, ABC! Click here to watch the Fox video, Click here to watch the CNN video. Click here to watch the ABC video
Project Icarus Details:
| Who | Oliver Yeh , Justin Lee, Eric Newton |
| Launch Date/Time | September 2nd, 2009, 11:45 EST |
| Launch Location | Sturbridge, MA - 42.12074, -72.06233 |
| Impact Location | Worcester, MA - 42.25504, -71.71943 |
| Distance Traveled | ~20 miles |
| Altitude Achieved | 98,000 feet, 17.5 miles |
| Helium Used | ~65 cubic feet |
| Weight | ~800g, 28oz |
| Camera | Canon A470 /w chdk open source firmware |
| Batteries | 4 Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA Batteries |
| GPS Reciever | Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone (“Boost Mobile”) |
| Tracking Software | Accutracking, Instamapper |
| Flight path | Google Earth kml |
| FAA regulation | Legal as long as payload is under 4 pounds |
**Below is a video for people who cannot access Youtube (e.g., people in China)
This is absolutely stunning. Congratulations, guys! I saw the article on Gizmodo and it gave me an idea. For a *really* cheap project (maybe for a middle school) just use a pay-as-you-go camera phone with MMS and write a small java app to MMS or email photos back to earth. Just sacrifice the phone and skip recovery. I think phones are rated for pretty low temperatures.. maybe -20C.. plus the phone is self-heating while it transmits so you *might* be able to get away without insulation/heating. For some additional cost, it would be possible to add temperature and altitude sensors like those available from Sparkfun using the phone’s accessory port and a bit more java programming, but this would be optional. At first I thought to use regular balloons, but a $20 weather balloon can’t be beat. Anyway, for a school on a shoestring budget, this might be something to develop further.
Not going to work unfortunately
At that altitude, cell phones have no signal
While you wouldn’t be able to email the photos at that height the phone could email or MMS them once it landed. This would require the device land in an area with cell service. In this day and age that shouldn’t be too difficult.
No josh they do
Duh. I didn’t think of that. The app would have to burst the images as long as it could, and then periodically poll and burst the queued images when a signal became available. I expect that cell signals are focused in a flat pattern rather than radiating like a point source, so there’s probably not much energy being radiated toward the sky, and vice versa for reception. Hmmm. I think I have an old phone sitting around somewhere…
I think this is awesome, I am going to try this within 2 weeks.
Good job guys! I think your onto something with this whole science and ar thing.
http://oddstrument.com/2008/05/14/tree-listeners-hear-trees-drinking/
So, I’m dying to do this with my kids, and could launch in upstate NY, near where this was done… 1 question (to anybody) Are there any issues about where and how the payload lands? What if it were to come down in the middle of traffic?
I have to say, pretty cool. However, you don’t mention what poor soul you sent up in your balloon to snap the photos, Hope they don’t have an issue with heights
I am assuming no video because the Motion Picture Guild wouldn’t let you send up a camera man since there was no room for donuts. Seriously though, nice use of applied science and product engineering.
At NOAA, we launched a few balloon cameras. I hacked several cheap digital cameras to wire the shutter switch to a microcontroller circuit for taking pictures on an interval. My favorite shot is this one, taken at a little under 30 km:
top of flight pic
The full galleries are at:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/Photo_Gallery/Projects/balloon_flight/June_6_2006/
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/Photo_Gallery/Projects/balloon_flight/November_2_2006/
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/Photo_Gallery/Projects/flight-11-2-06/
Ah, these must be fakes, like the Apollo moon shots: no stars in the nearly black sky.
Oh, yeah,
you’ve got to be kidding…
go outside at night and take a quci snapshot and tell me how many stars you see in your photograph..
Quick i meant
BTW, the captions are a bit off: decimal points seem to have been left out of the altitude and pressure readings. At least I don’t *think* your balloon got 30,000 km away from Earth…
Oops, looks like I screwed up the units in the labeling. I’ll have to fix the script. Funny how I never noticed that
.
Hey, just wanted to congratulate you guys on a successful launch. I’m studying at SMU in Dallas and was looking for answers on how to do this with an assembled team myself. Coincidentally this only happened a few days ago and I’m originally from Worcester myself!
Very interesting. I’ve taken the liberty of modifying the Google Earth KML file to include the altitude information so that the path can be viewed in three dimensions. In the current file the altitude in feet is only specified in the text description. Unfortunately it looks like there are some gaps in the coverage as well as a maximum altitude cap of 19853 feet.
Sorry, pasted URL tag didn’t work: http://drop.io/balloonpath
Awesome.
Did you create a time-lapse video of the individual frames? I’d really like to see that.
QuickTime Pro will do the trick. Just import the image sequence and pick a playback frame rate. Export with the codec and size of your choice.
Excellent work!
Gary
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Gary O’Brien
Photographer
Charlotte, NC USA
http://garyobrien.com
http://panoramist.blogspot.com
IM: garyobrien1
Twitter: @garyobrien
Facebook, Linked In: Gary O’Brien
CONGRATULATIONS FROM BRASIL, VERY GEEK!
You guys made Wired Magazine as well! Great work!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/stratophoto/
Awesome job, guys. I’d love to see build docs and get more details on thing like the antenna.
I think you guys have an awesome business opportunity here … you could sell kits, or let people pay you to take pictures of specific places. And how about putting a 1080p HD video camera on that thing?
I rather like the fact that you aren’t having to burn through tons and tons of fuel (literally) to do all this.
If you don’t mind burning a Mino HD, that would record about 60 minutes of 720P HD feed and is REALLY lightweight.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005022/Teens-capture-images-of-space-with-56-camera-and-balloon.html
I took the liberty of modifying the flight path to include the altitude information, and changing the display to be a bit more appropriate. Results here:
http://mod.ifies.com/f/090914_Ourballoon_altmod.kmz
http://mod.ifies.com/f/090914_Ourballoon_altmod.kml
I’d be honored if you used these instead of your current flight plan.
This is a really neat project
Why not use the camera mode to take video, or use a video camera it would be better an HD camera to shot video instead of pictures.
I am sure that if you place a donate option in this page a lot of people would send you money so that you can keep with your experiments.
I would donate easily $10 dollars for your project, if you multiply this amount for hundreds or thousands you can make better projects like this one.
Excellent work, gentlemen–my hat’s off to you! –One naive suggestion: might you want to dangle a corner-reflector from the bottom next time, so that your device would show up on the air-traffic control radar?
Good luck and keep up the good work. I suggest that for your next project you tunnel to the center of the earth using Legos and a used pick-axe.
Any chance you could provide detailed instructions on how you did it?
I’d love to duplicate your effort as a project with my grand kids.
That is really cool! Congrats!
I come to your site because it keeps me entertained and aware of new things.