About a year ago I saw a post on Sparkfun about high altitude ballooning that really caught my attention. Basically, you attach a camera to a helium-filled weather balloon and send it up to an altitude of about 100,000 ft to take pictures of the earth. The pictures and videos people have taken are breathtaking. The sky is black and the curvature of the earth can be seen. I immediately started reading all I could to figure out how I could join this limited group of people with pictures from space.
After a lot of research I found out there’s a lot more to it than my one sentence description above. The region of space around 100,000 ft is called ‘Near Space’ because the conditions are closer to those in space than here on the earth’s surface. Pressure drops close to a vacuum and temperatures can reach -90 °F. That’s a pretty rough environment for anything to survive. To top it off, there’s no easy way to control a balloon that’s 19 miles away from you and tracking it becomes the biggest challenge. After all, there’s no point in taking pictures if you can’t find the camera when it lands!
Parallax has a must-read set of tutorials for those getting into the world of near space exploration. The main components needed are the balloon, capsule, parachute, camera and on-board tracking electronics. Next up, I’ll describe the components I chose for my high altitude balloon and how they all work together to accomplish a near space mission.
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