HD Video From the Edge of Space, On the Cheap 205
SoundDoc75 links to a page describing the motivations and problem-solving behind "a 10-minute HD video taken on August 24th with a Canon Vixia HF20 HD camera suspended from a 1500g hydrogen balloon and launched near Edmonton, Alberta. This is the first known amateur video taken from this height — 107,145 feet."
How misleading! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How misleading! (Score:4, Informative)
When we find God, maybe we can get him to stop the Slashdot editors from posting so many dupes?
I mean honestly. I logged in, looked down the page, and had to check the date thinking I'd somehow slipped back into last week.
The last one was a team from MIT, with normal digital stills which is getting fairly routine, this one has hi-def video... Same Idea, different beast...
Re:How misleading! (Score:4, Insightful)
I was surprised that the camera was still picking-up sound when it was 20 miles high. I thought the air would be too thin for the microphone to sense anything.
Re:How misleading! (Score:4, Interesting)
It was mechanically coupled to the styrofoam enclosure, so there is a good deal of surface area to respond to sound waves. Most of the sound at that altitude seems from the enclosure anyhow - that would be picked up by the non-isolated mic even in a vacuum with that setup.
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What does GOD need with a Balloon?
weird (Score:2)
It looks like slashes become backslashes in that height
First amateurs? Not quite! (Score:5, Funny)
That's not the first amateur video from that height, I've seen the quality of the video astronauts shoot. If they're not amateur cameramen, who is?
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This is the first known amateur video taken from this height â" 107,145 feet."
they weren't taken at the height, were they? Yes this is the first from the height...not the highest over all~
Re:First amateurs? Not quite! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, the 218 videos from 107,146 feet and the 342 from 107,147 feet are not the same as this one.
Re:First amateurs? Not quite! (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? What matters is that they did something that was awesome to do. Imagine yourself lifting up a baloon with a camera attached to it, wondering what will happen. Later on you find your camera back. You wait for what seems to be like forever for the 32GB to get transfered onto your computer. You watch the video from when you were standing in a grass field and watch what happened when you were there on the ground. You watch your camera fly into outer fscking space. You feel like "WOW! Dude that's beautifull... we freakin done it! We actually did it! It worked!".
And then you feel awesome for a complete month, figuring out what to do next, while the world gets to see what you saw.
You're suppose to like this, given the fact that you are on /. What's wrong with you?
Re:First amateurs? Not quite! (Score:5, Funny)
No, they're professional astronauts with a hobby. I was a professional fireman for years, and sometimes at night I played Pokemon. That doesn't make me a professional Pokemon Trainer.
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No, they're professional astronauts with a hobby. I was a professional fireman for years, and sometimes at night I played Pokemon. That doesn't make me a professional Pokemon Trainer.
It does if you're playing Pokemon whilst putting out fires :)
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That would make me a professional multitasker!
Re:First amateurs? Not quite! (Score:5, Informative)
The Apollo astronauts were trained by a professional photographer on how to use the custom (Hasselbak or something close to that.) cameras for use on the moon.
They were modified Hasselblad [wikipedia.org] cameras (a very nice medium format film camera). They brought the film back but left the cameras on the moon.
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Actually, judging from the videos of a spacewalk, they do weigh less than a duck.
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You can't tell how much something weighs by how fast it falls. :p
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That's typically true, but there are seldom exceptions - This being one of them.
If something falls at 0 ft/second, it weighs nothing. If it falls up, it weighs less than nothing.
These things, of course, tell you little about the object's mass.
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Good points... although these exceptions still wouldn't help you tell whether an astronaut weighed less than a duck. Unless the astronaut fell up, I suppose, but that would be an astronaut with one serious case of gas.
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Since science has so far not found anything that weighs nothing while at rest, nor anything that wheights less than nothing, that is pure speculation. It is unknown how such objects would behave
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You can't tell how much something weighs by how fast it falls. :p
I think you're confusing mass with weight. In Newtonian physics, mass is constant, and weight = mass*gravity.
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I think you're confusing mass with weight.
No, I'm not.
In Newtonian physics, mass is constant, and weight = mass*gravity.
Correct. And you still can't tell how much something weighs by how fast it falls.
You can't tell its mass or its weight by how fast it falls. (If you knew one, you could find the other by the formula you gave, of course.)
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A slashdotter?
This seems to be getting pretty routine (Score:2)
But it's still way way cool and I'd love to do something like this myself.
I was thinking of a short-lived TV show I immediately loved and can't think of its name (and sadly, google hasn't been my friend to find it) about a group of people who launch a spaceship to the moon using stuff from a junkyard. In a similar vein, I suppose, as a way of "upping the ante", what would be the chances of attaching a couple of rockets to the side so that, when the balloon has gotten as far as it's going to go, the rockets
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Achieving orbit would be impossible for such a project. Most of the energy in spacefaring rockets is spent on gaining velocity, not altitude. This balloon would give a lot of altitude "for free", but virtually no velocity. Gravity is pretty much as strong at 30 km as it is here on the ground, so it's not like the rockets would have an easier time lifting the payload than they do at ground level.
Kind of cool, but it made me dizzy (Score:4, Interesting)
Can they control or limit the camera spin? It makes sense they can't right after the balloon bursts, but I would think there might be some kind of tricks they could do in the atmosphere on ascent and descent.
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Can they control or limit the camera spin? It makes sense they can't right after the balloon bursts, but I would think there might be some kind of tricks they could do in the atmosphere on ascent and descent.
Seems to me it would be better to digitally scrub the video, and keep your hardware cheap.
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What would have been cooler would have been a mirror that panorama makers use (the 360 ones). Point the camera at that. Do some trickery to do some anti spin, and then you could have a full 360 ascent.
CPU processing would be insane though.
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They could add a rudder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Watching the video I thought the same thing about controlling the spin. All it would take is a rudder mounted on a boom (no elevator).
Then again, why not add an elevator, wings, ailerons, etc? They could add a pico pilot
http://www.u-nav.com/picopilot.html [u-nav.com]
And have the camera always pointed towards home. Then when the balloon bursts, instead of an out of control fall, they could have a nice controlled glide back to earth.
By giving the wings a ton of dihedral, it would automagically keep the camera steady on descent.
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Those are interesting ideas. I hope that the hobbyists will get into a friendly competition to see who can make the best video and achieve the highest altitude. It would be fun to see what they come up with. I'd consider trying it myself.
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Can they control or limit the camera spin? It makes sense they can't right after the balloon bursts, but I would think there might be some kind of tricks they could do in the atmosphere on ascent and descent.
I debated that one myself. A gyroscope would help keep it from pitching but it won't stop spin. There are tracking rigs that lock to fixed points but it would add a lot of weight and expense. Building a vertical wing onto the housing might help but it could make it worse. The best thing would be to use three balloons in a triangle configuration hopefully with ridge rods to space them out a bit. The problem with the rig is it's far too easy for a single balloon to rotate given it has little wind resistance.
107,145 feet (Score:2)
This is the first known amateur video taken from this height — 107,145 feet.
Yes, and I bet it remains the only one taken from that (exact) height. ;)
(If they'd said "this high", I'd have interpreted it to mean "or higher", but strangely "this height" doesn't strike me the same.)
Hell of a skydive! :D (Score:4, Insightful)
In the beginning it reminded me of how cool it is to fly, and I don't mean airliner, I mean small plane, ideally old-school open cockpit. It's not only all kinds of fun, it always detaches you from the world below and its petty concerns, in a way. Up there, you're literally free as a bird, it's magic.
Second half of the vid was one hell of a skydive! :D
Awesome flight, kudos guys!
"Edge of Space" is 100 km (Score:4, Insightful)
The boundary of space is conventionally defined at 100 km, or about 260,000 feet. Sending a weather balloon to 107,000 feet is nice, but it's only 40% of the way to the "edge of space."
Which, of course, you could have realized just by thinking about it. We define "space" as meaning "above the sensible atmosphere," and if you get there in a balloon, it couldn't be above the atmosphere.
Re:"Edge of Space" is 100 km (Score:4, Informative)
100Km is about 328,000 feet. That's why Space Ship One had a tail number of N328KF.
Also, the North Texas Balloon Team [edtexas.com] and the South Texas Balloon Project [qsl.net] routinely (with launches approximately annually) send balloons with video cameras to altitudes in excess of 100,000 feet. Those are just the two balloon projects I'm familiar with. I am sure there are others because it's not particularly hard to do.
So, this is pure ho-hum to me. Let me know when they've done it a couple of dozen times.
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So, this is pure ho-hum to me. Let me know when they've done it a couple of dozen times.
No one is claiming this is some astounding breakthrough or unheard of application of technology. They're saying "Hey, these guys sent a video camera up to 100k feet and this is the footage they got. Cool, huh?" Most of us would say we could/would do something like this if we had the time... initiative... willingness to get off our lazy butts and do it. But most of us never will. These guys actually did, and we're applauding them for it.
Re:"Edge of Space" is 100 km (Score:5, Informative)
It's an exponential decay. There is no sharp cutoff. Nothing special happens at 100 km. The scale height [wikipedia.org] of the earth's atmosphere is about 7 km, so the pressure at 107,000 ft (32 km) is about 10^-2 of what it is at the surface, while the pressure at 100 km is about 10^-6 of surface pressure. It's not like somewhere in between 10^-2 atm and 10^-6 atm there's a mystical barrier that suddenly makes balloon flight impossible. It just gets harder and harder; to stay aloft with a given volume of hydrogen, a balloon at 100 km would have to have 10^-4 of the weight of a balloon that's neutrally buoyant at 32 km. It just happens to be difficult to make a balloon with sufficiently thin walls, high strength, and low surface-to-volume ratio.
If you watch the (very cool) video, the sky is black, there is no sound, and the curvature of the earth is extremely obvious. I would call that the "edge of space" -- for some definitions of "edge of space." There's not some international standards body that defines terms like "edge of space."
Re:"Edge of Space" is 100 km (Score:4, Informative)
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It's an exponential decay. There is no sharp cutoff. Nothing special happens at 100 km.
Yes it does. At around that height the theoretical speed that would be required to generate enough lift to stay in the 'air' surpasses orbital speed in vacuum.
Look at 'Karman line'.
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twitter (Score:2)
for those who are interested, this bear project [sbszoo.com] has a twitter page [twitter.com]: https://twitter.com/BEAR_HAB [twitter.com]. (linked twice)
Before the days of HD ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and memory cards, ham radio operators did this one [youtube.com] in 1989, which was just standard definition, but it went further (from Illinois to nearly Indianapolis) and higher. It just transmitted the signal back via the UHF transmitter on board.
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That one had a much better soundtrack, too. 4 stars.
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I wonder how accurate the altimeter is.
At 4 minutes it goes 125k, 110, 119 k per-second.
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Valve (Score:3, Interesting)
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Encasing it in a plastic shell.
Re:Valve (Score:5, Informative)
Weight restrictions vs performance. The envelope is filled to 25% capacity with helium, then released. As the balloon ascends, the gas expands, filling the envelope completely. Once it reaches altitude, it will stay there until either the membrane fails or programmed cutter severs the the tether, letting the payload descend back to the ground. A release valve would prolong the flight, but with amateur rides like this, they usually let it ride up until it bursts at a calculated altitude from the overpressure. 100K feet is impressive and the video is stunning.
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Does the buoyancy of the balloon change with height or does the increase in volume perfectly cancels with the reduction in density of the air mass displaced?
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A mechanism to vent gas introduces a rather tragic possible failure vector: equilibrium. Your balloon floats along until it's out of reach of the chase team and you don't get your payload back. (Which might be fine if you're using telemetry.)
At least with this method you're guaranteed that the payload will come back sooner rather than much, much later.
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I'd been thinking similar things. Venting gas would limit their ultimate height though. I wonder if they could:
Underinflate the balloon at ground level so it's got just enough bouyancy to get off the ground. Then the ballon inflates itself as the external pressure drops. It'd still pop eventually, but might last a good bit longer.
Carry a second (third? smaller?) balloon that inflates off the main ballon when the internal pressure gets high enough. I don't know how much a second balloon would weight thi
now I know (Score:4, Interesting)
Now I have some idea of what it was like for Joe Kittinger [wikipedia.org], a guy who sky-dived over 102,000 ft. back in the Fifties.
-l
unobscured sun (Score:2)
Seth
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NASA records video from the Solid Rocket Boosters on Space Shuttle launches. 6 minutes or so from the pad up to around 200,000ft and then all the way down to the sea. You can see the orbiter fly away, the other SRB as they both tumble, and the sun in the blackness of space although it's often too bright for the camera to cope with.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FadV-VwuXWo [youtube.com]
Insta-cred for me! (Score:2)
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Questions for Someone who knows this stuff... (Score:2)
1) How much power would it take to get to orbit from that height?
2) How hard would this be for a person to accomplish? (Human flight)
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Almost identical to a ground launch. Getting 100 km up is the easy part (note: they didn't, they got less than 33 km up), getting over 7 km/s of horizontal velocity is the hard part. It's so hard that most boosters start accelerating as soon as they leave the ground.. that makes them supersonic in the low atmosphere, which means they need a fancy aeroshell or they'll burn up.
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Actually, they may have only gotten ~33km up, but those are the densest 33km of the trip. When you take into account the extra fuel they would need to overcome atmospheric drag at lower altitudes, each km of travel at low altitude is worth more than each km at high altitude. My understanding was that this leads to a significant fuel savings, which means a lighter vehicle, which means less energy to get it up to that 7km/s you were talking about.
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A balloon that could lift a 100t rocket.. yeah, that's likely to be cheaper than just making the rocket a little bigger.
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No, no you're thinking about this all wrong. You get 10,000 balloons, each carrying 0.1t, and attach them like you would baloons to a lawn chair. Then, when you get the the desired altitude, you just pull out your BB gun and... wait, I think I read about this somewhere else already...
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Almost identical to a ground launch. Getting 100 km up is the easy part (note: they didn't, they got less than 33 km up), getting over 7 km/s of horizontal velocity is the hard part. It's so hard that most boosters start accelerating as soon as they leave the ground.. that makes them supersonic in the low atmosphere, which means they need a fancy aeroshell or they'll burn up.
Right. To be fair, though, although getting to orbital velocity is the hard part, you do gain a bit by starting from outside (the dense part of) the atmosphere. Turns out that, for a SSTO, that's significant (mostly because SSTOs are so sensitive to small variations to start with). Ages ago I calculated [harvard.edu] that starting out above the atmosphere would give a typical SSTO about a 20% gain in mass to orbit. Interestingly, a significant fraction of this is due to the increased performance of rocket engines in v
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*punches himself in the balls*
There, that'll learn me.
Different Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of you complaining about the jerky video: STFU!
For those of you saying it isn't practical: So What!
I want to take my hat off to these dudes and give them a hearty round of applause and say "Great job guys!"
My point here is these guys had a vision, that led to an idea, that lead to an exparament where a couple of pretty normal folks did something extrodinary. It is the same kind of curiosity that Ben Franklin had when he flew the kite and "discovered" electricity.
Those of you who have offered criticisim, I ask you to reply to this post and tell me what you have done without backing that approximates or bests their very cool accomplishment.
Those of you who have a vision share it, maybe someone will help you make it an idea so, I invite you to share your vision.
For those of you who have an idea, share it and maybe someone will help you make it real.
We don't need government, business, or universities to make the world a better place; just a few ordinary folks who try to do extrodinary things!
Those of you who think this is just very cool, use this thread to virtually offer your applause and (real) encouraging comments!
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I did not say that government, business, or universities are bad - just that people can do extrodinary things on their own.
I found inspiration in what these folks did (and did on their own). If more people did stuff like this, I am pretty sure the world would be a better place.
I think that my original post was pretty clear but for the sake of clarity - what I wanted to do with my post was inspire others to do something or at least be someone who encourages people that take the bull by the horns!
Look, I don
Not AGAIN (Score:2)
Obligatory quote from THGTTG (Score:2)
Processed the KML file a bit (Score:2)
http://trygnulinux.com/bear4-speed-vs-alt.ods [trygnulinux.com]
Definitely not the first (Score:2)
These guys http://natrium42.com/halo/flight2/ [natrium42.com] made a video from 30 km altitude (100.000 feet) almost 2 years ago.
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Nah, its just that everyone is doing it but you.
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Completely different projects.
Re:DUP. *NOT* (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's the same thing.
Except that the other story was about different people. And they were from MIT, not Sherwood Park, Canada. And they used a still camera, not a video one.
So yeah, except for the fact that everything is different, it's completely the same.
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Re:Why is slashdot always behind like 2 weeks (Score:5, Funny)
editors are cracksmoke
And I'm glad. You see, this information comes from Edmonton. To get it to Slashdot, brave Canadian Voyageurs and their faithful Eskimo sidekicks must trek through millions of miles of frozen wastelands filled with polar bears, undead elk that thirst for dwarven blood, and the occasional crazed Frenchman. It is only the far and distant beacon of crack smoke billowing from the obsidian tower of Slashdot HQ that prevents them from getting lost in the soul-destroying wilds and eaten by madding tundra, a close cousin to the dread gazebo.
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However, this video was cool, if we can fix the shaky-cam somehow, even cooler.
Yeah, all that constant panning of the scenery reminds me of what I see when operating Flight Simulator using only the keyboard.
Re:There's a reason this doesn't happen often (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame they didn't put some gyros and a free mount to get better video. If you're going to bother buying a new HD video camera, fly from Japan to Canada and (presumably) help pay for this balloon launch it seems it would have been worth it to put at least one gyro on there. It would have added to the weight (both due to the gyro and due to the extra batteries needed to power it), but it would have dramatically improved the video quality.
(I'm not referring to expensive professional, bulky gyro mounts like http://www.camerasystems.com/rentals.htm [camerasystems.com] -- any gyro would have been better than nothing -- heck, even a spindle mount with a wind vane on the styrofoam cube would have been a big improvement).
Re:There's a reason this doesn't happen often (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a motor attached to a spinning disk would have halped a lot, two of these mounted perpendicular to each other should be enough to greatly dampen the spinning and oscillation.
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A gyro would be mounted within the box. It wouldn't need to weigh more than a pound for something of that size.
If they were at the weight limit then they still could have hung the cube on something that can twist freely and attach something like a weather vane or ribbon to give it some passive stability with very little extra weight.
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You should wait until it gets to the top when the baloon bursts, and it starts falling.
I was fine up until then.
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How exactly do you think they got the video from it?
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Is this joke from monty python and the holy grail?
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WTFV. At the end, you can see the people that launched it waiting to retrieve it before it even landed. Unlike those other students who did it on the cheap, it appears these people did something a little more sophisticated and were tracking it the entire time.
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A friend of mine did a project like this as well with a a regular digital camera, no video. It flew from Vulcan, AB to Hanna AB.
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Transport Canada regulations - now that's a different story.
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Re:legal? safe? ATC? (Score:5, Informative)
I am a member of the Tennessee Balloon Group [nt4bg.net]. We had a parachute failure on one of our flights. TABEL-5 if I remember correctly. It burned in at a whopping 55 MPH and landed in a tree. We only launch if the predicted burst and landing is over a rural area.
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"a 10-minute HD video taken on August 24th with a Canon Vixia HF20 HD camera suspended from a 1500g hydrogen balloon [sbszoo.com] and launched near Edmonton, Alberta. This is the first known amateur video taken from this height â" 107,145 feet."
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