My college recently received a grant from NASA that allows us to pursue high altitude balloon projects. I have written about this before, and asked about some potential ideas for experiments and sensors.
Today, in Lexington, IL we launched a balloon with some payloads on it. This was our first launch, so our payload consisted of a pair of Raspberry Pi cameras, and an Arduino with the BMP Pressure/Temperature/Altitude Sensor. Prior to the launch I tested the BMP sensor by taking it for a ride to the top of the Sears Tower.
The sensor worked. The shape of the curve is what I would expect, though the actual altitude values surprised me. I am going to have to look in to how that is calculated. At any rate, the circuit worked, and one of my students built in a red light / green light system to let us know if things are working. After one test, everything looked great.
A storm was brewing in Lexington, so we had to hustle to get our balloon out in front of it. We used a 1600g balloon with about 14 pounds of lift for roughly 8 pounds of payload. (The FAA limits us to 12 pounds overall.)
The sky behind us was getting pretty dark.
Our materials were packed into a foam box, held in place with cable ties.
Once we did the pre-flight check, and we were convinced everything was working, we let the balloon fly. The pictures below are just a few of the more than 2000 that our two Pi Cameras took at 10 second intervals.
The balloon burst at an altitude of about 90,000. In later pictures I can see the turbulence with a brief free fall before our parachute deployed. Shortly after that, both cameras failed. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the cameras were on the outside of the payload box, and it descended through a storm. When it landed, both RPis were still on, but the cameras weren't taking pictures.
This was a tremendously fun project. I have about six more planned over the summer, and we have more experiments to do. We have some things to revise, but this was a great start. Any guidance or suggestions from the community would be most welcome!
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