Sending my new Canon camera 100 000 feet into orbit

[dtmcnamara]

*****Update 9/29/09*****

Well not much has been done with most of the people having a test this week and next week. We have been working on some drop tests with various designs of cardboard and Styrofoam. Once the bottom crash pad design is complete then the rest of the design can be finished. Once we get a finished design for the camera box we will post a few pics.

THANKS






Ok so a while back I read an article about a group of kids that took two large balloons, a GPS device and a camera and decided to see what they could get picture of. They sent the camera 100 000 feet into orbit and got some outstanding pictures and were able to track the exact crash location due to the GPS receiver on everything. Well it worked great and minus the camera and GPS sacrifice everything worked as planned.

Well I have decided to do it. Me along with a few fellow camera/tech nerds are going to be launching a Canon camera into orbit within the next 2 months. We are working on the GPS tracking device at the moment and trying to find a way to hard wire a longer lasting battery and a 16GB memory card to the camera outside the unit, in order to ensure the SD card stays safe.

At the moment we are shooting for the same 100 000 feet up the only difference is that we will be setting out camera to time laps every 2 seconds in order to capture the entire journey up...and down.

We are estimation a life of approximately 800 feet per minute. We expect the camera to reach its highest altitude nearly 2 hours into flight and then start its decent down to earth again. Depending on drag we will be looking at about a 20-35 minute free fall until impact so we are estimation approximately 4800 picture will be taken if we set the camera to take a picture every 2 seconds.

I will post more information as things work there way out but at the moment to rig looks like follows:

GPS receiver out of a Garmin
Canon SD1200 (or something in that range)
2 high maH 3.7v batteries
16-32 GB SD card
foam padding
custom hard wire for batteries and SD card
custom case to attempt to protect SD card (who cares about the camera and GPS receiver...lol)
2 giant latex balloons
lots of helium

Like I said we are still on the testing of everything but once things start to get closer and closer to launch I will let everyone know. This should be something worth looking at if all things go well. Hell, if it works good enough we might send a second one up there with multiple cameras in it.