# The $150 Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget



## syscom3 (Sep 15, 2009)

The $150 Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

The $150 Space Camera.

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

Launch

Two weeks ago, on Sept. 2, at the leisurely post-breakfast hour of 11:45 a.m., the balloon was launched from Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Lee and Yeh took a road trip in order to stop prevailing winds from taking the balloon out onto the Atlantic, and checked in on the University of Wisconsin’s balloon trajectory website to estimate the landing site.

Because of spotty cellphone coverage in central Massachusetts, it was important to keep the rig in the center of the state so it could be found upon landing. Light winds meant the guys got lucky and, although the cellphone’s external antenna was buried upon landing, the fix they got as the balloon was coming down was close enough.

The Photographs

The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet. The Canon was hacked with the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon’s cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8-GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight.

The picture you see above was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took 40 minutes to come back to Earth.

What is most astonishing about this launch, named Project Icarus, is that anyone could do it. The budget is so small as to be almost nonexistent (the guys slept in their car the night before the launch to save money), so that even if everything went wrong, a second, third or fourth attempt would be easy. All it took was a grand idea and an afternoon poking around the hardware store.

The project website has few details on how the balloon was put together — but the students say they will be selling step-by-step instructions for $150 soon. That means you will soon be able to launch your own balloon for just $300 — $150 for the instructions and $150 for the parts.


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## B-17engineer (Sep 15, 2009)

Wow!!!! just with 150 dollars. Jeez.


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## ccheese (Sep 15, 2009)

Bravo to Justin and Oliver. Just goes to show you......

Charles


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## Gnomey (Sep 15, 2009)

Certainly a cool idea put through to execution. Would certainly give it ago except for the fact that from here it would end up in the sea so you wouldn't get it back :/


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## 109ROAMING (Sep 15, 2009)

Great stuff

How long though before this happens

"Pilot to copilot WTF is that?"


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 15, 2009)

That is fricken awesome!


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## B-17engineer (Sep 15, 2009)

109ROAMING said:


> Great stuff
> 
> How long though before this happens
> 
> "Pilot to copilot WTF is that?"



 tomorrow you hear about a flood of UFO sightings. haha


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## RabidAlien (Sep 16, 2009)

ETA: Never underestimate the devious cunning of smart people who are bored.


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## Colin1 (Sep 16, 2009)

Even across continental North America
I'm surprised there wasn't a chance of it drifting off the continent and into the Atlantic - 18 miles is a long way up to hope there's no air currents and to a lesser extent, on the way down as well.

Great story though, two guys who have done their Institute proud and not through high-brow academic nous, simply through resourceful thinking.

No reason why those photos couldn't be entered in a photo competition either, the project's a winner from start to finish, a photography award would be the icing on the cake.

Thumbs up to the pair of them, outstanding.


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Sep 16, 2009)

Gotta say, wow! Pretty cool idea those guys cooked up.


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## proton45 (Sep 16, 2009)

Some people on a tv show did something very similar...it was a uk "science show" call "Bang goes the theory"...they did it in the uk so maybe the currents don't take it that far (?).


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## GrauGeist (Sep 17, 2009)

When I was a kid, I had one of those Black Estes rocket kits that had a kodak 110 camera in the nose...

When I had the film developed, I was in awe of the images taken from heights about 500 feet...

But flying a camera to the edge of space...that's incredibly cool!

Gotta hand it to those two, way to go!


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## syscom3 (Sep 17, 2009)

GrauGeist said:


> When I was a kid, I had one of those Black Estes rocket kits that had a kodak 110 camera in the nose...
> 
> When I had the film developed, I was in awe of the images taken from heights about 500 feet...
> .....





I remember those rockets. I believe it was called "CamRock". I think they also had a movie camera version called "Cinerock".


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## wheelsup_cavu (Sep 20, 2009)

That was a neat idea.
IMO, the pictures are very good too.


Wheels


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 20, 2009)

GrauGeist said:


> When I was a kid, I had one of those Black Estes rocket kits that had a kodak 110 camera in the nose...
> 
> When I had the film developed, I was in awe of the images taken from heights about 500 feet...



Holy crap, I'd forgotten about those things!


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## Soren (Sep 20, 2009)

Makes NASA look pretty stupid to be honest... incredible.


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## proton45 (Sep 20, 2009)

wheelsup_cavu said:


> That was a neat idea.
> IMO, the pictures are very good too.
> 
> 
> Wheels



One kind'a wonders how many of the pictures where actually worth looking at... I assume that the camera was just clicking away for 5-10 minutes and then they just kept the photos that where worth looking at...

Still a fun idea, I'm not taking anything away from the initiative these young lads are showing...but maybe the idea can even be improved (a little).


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## syscom3 (Sep 20, 2009)

Soren said:


> Makes NASA look pretty stupid to be honest... incredible.



Why?

NASA (and the NRO) invented digital cameras. And it was the forerunners of NASA that did this very same thing in the 1930's.


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## proton45 (Sep 20, 2009)

syscom3 said:


> Why?
> 
> NASA (and the NRO) invented digital cameras. And it was the forerunners of NASA that did this very same thing in the 1930's.



I kind of had the same thought...


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## RabidAlien (Sep 20, 2009)

Ditto.

As for the number of "bad photos", there were probably quite a few. No photographer, with the exception of Ansel Adams, ever took just one picture and walked away from a scene with a winner. Back in the 35mm film days, professional photographers were generally happy with one marketable shot in a 36-exposure roll. Digital just makes it that much easier. If Evan himself were to strap his best camera and lens inside a $1.50 styrafoam cooler and send it into the stratosphere (he'd probably have a coronary!), even he'd get blurry, out-of-focus, pitch-black-of-space shots. Its the nature of the beast.

Story goes, about NASA and its R&D: they spent billions researching and coming up with a pen that would write in the absence of gravity. Russia sent its astronauts up....with pencils. Who knows if its true....its still funny as heck!


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## wheelsup_cavu (Sep 22, 2009)

RabidAlien said:


> Story goes, about NASA and its R&D: they spent billions researching and coming up with a pen that would write in the absence of gravity. Russia sent its astronauts up....with pencils. Who knows if its true....its still funny as heck!


I've heard that one before too.
It sounds silly enough to be true.


Wheels


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## proton45 (Sep 22, 2009)

wheelsup_cavu said:


> I've heard that one before too.
> It sounds silly enough to be true.
> 
> 
> Wheels



pencils have to be sharpened...I think the shards where an issue.


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## Soren (Sep 23, 2009)

syscom3 said:


> Why?
> 
> NASA (and the NRO) invented digital cameras. And it was the forerunners of NASA that did this very same thing in the 1930's.



Why ? Are you serious ? Those two kids just did what NASA would've spent thousands of dollars on duplicating. The point here is that NASA is spending a lot more money than necessary on tasks which can be just as efficiently carried out by the help of some creative thinking. (I think the pencil joke is pretty telling aswell) 

As for the digital camera, AFAIK the american photo company Kodak invented the first one, not NASA.


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## syscom3 (Sep 23, 2009)

Soren said:


> Why ? Are you serious ? Those two kids just did what NASA would've spent thousands of dollars on duplicating. The point here is that NASA is spending a lot more money than necessary on tasks which can be just as efficiently carried out by the help of some creative thinking. (I think the pencil joke is pretty telling aswell)
> 
> As for the digital camera, AFAIK the american photo company Kodak invented the first one, not NASA.




Care to name some of those programs?

NASA and the DOD provided the money needed to invent the space rated CCD's that Kodak was to use for the deveoplement of the first digital cameras. A lot of seperate technologies that were cutting edge for the time had to be created. And it was immensely costly to do it. In the late 60's there simply was no commercial application for digital photos and the only two potential users was the military and NASA.


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## Soren (Sep 24, 2009)

Programs? All I'm saying is that NASA wouldn't have done it as cheaply as those two kids, they would've spent a lot more money. Take the 1950's stratosphere balloons that NASA was experimenting with, they were pretty darn expensive.


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## proton45 (Sep 24, 2009)

Soren said:


> Programs? All I'm saying is that NASA wouldn't have done it as cheaply as those two kids, they would've spent a lot more money. Take the 1950's stratosphere balloons that NASA was experimenting with, they were pretty darn expensive.



The reason these kids can do it so cheaply is because NASA did it way back then...technology always trickles down and gets cheaper.


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## syscom3 (Sep 24, 2009)

The first "space shot", in 1935

AmericanHeritage.com / Space Shot: 1935


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