I knew that if and when this worked, I would see you guys come up with every mosaic and analysis an interpretation - far quicker and far better than I could. I just tried to get the best data I could to feed the machine

I now understand, perhaps a bit more than most, how and why Steve and Jim and Alfred and Pete do what they do. I now also can not understand, more than ever, why Europe does the opposite. But I can tell you I know EXACTLY why the ESOC guys have turned that VMC back on.

Probably wrong, but roughly indicative, and certainly badly photoshopped....

New mission phase, new UMSF logo ( Thanks Astro0 ! )

Doug

Here's the combined view using google earth, and the KMZ's that the MODIS guys produce.

This image - http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtim...7132500.4km.jpg at 1320Z is 5 mins before launch. It's distorted - but the near realtime subset image for Aqua will use that same image, properly projected..

So these two (the Aqua ones, not Terra - that's 2hrs earlier) cover the view over the UK, and to the east, at, roughly, flight time

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...pe_2_01.2008237
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...pe_2_02.2008237

LOL - love this page - http://www.eoss.org/handbook/chap3.htm

"If you stacked pop cans 100,000 ft high, it would take about 259,500 pop cans (each pop can is 4 -5/8 inches high when you subtract out the part of the can that fits inside the can below it). That's about 10,800 cases of pop."

When you download the images, can you still find the 'image taken' time on them? If so - you can X-ref that back to the BIG LOG. (The EXIF image data has that)

http://www.pegasushabproject.org.uk/wiki/d...s:haps-1:biglog

i.e. 6313 was taken at 145502 - which means an altitude of 22482.7M - only 2/3rds the way 'up'

Doug

The JPG's have finished uploading - so it's all there - enjoy

The first few stills are blurry just because it's REALLY moving around, 180deg/sec in some cases - look at the second .avi to see what I mean.

MVI_6494.AVI is at apogee and you can see pieces of the ballon just after it has burst ( and the resulting chaos that freefall at 106,000 ft and 11mbar )

From 1520Z to 1530Z, the payload was over 30km - which is images IMG_6447 to IMG_6501 ( or MVI's in the same range )

To be honest, you would probably just make it worse. It's just too chaotic and random to try and guesstimate what might or might not make it all more stable. Anything that can give the parachute something to get tangled up in, probably isn't a great idea. That's why I decided against putting a small camera out on a beam to image the payload in-situ. The best way is to make a small payload, and put it on a long long line to the balloon and let the laws of physics ( and the low frequency of the pendulum you're left with) do the rest.


MVI_6080.avi is just a sub-set from that large MOV ( the MOV's are all the AVI's in sequence ) - so it's the same thing - and at 11,000ish M ( 36kft ) - it's not beyond the realm of possibility that there's an aircraft nearby. Given that I can hear the aircraft at 15kft the way into East Midlands from the ground here - it wouldn't have to be close to hear it. That that sound is the only thing for, well, 11km in any direction - and without a lot of doppler shift it's not passing that close by.


The audio is infact only 11khz 8bit mono off the camera - that's all it's got I"m afraid. It was a £70 camera, I didn't fancy risking anything more expensive than that.



Yeah - we spotted that last night looking at them from the boot of our car....I thought I'd see how carefully people were looking

All the raw movies
http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/VIDEOS/

Probably better are these
http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/EDITED/MOVIES/

Three MOV's which show all the movies strung together - and one MOV which shows every still in sequence at 6fps

The Stills are still uploading. I gave up trying to get GPS into the EXIF - I'll just do a page of the best stills and mosaics

http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/PHOTOS/

Right - ALL the JPG's, AVI's, as well as three MOVs (which string together all the AVI's into about 25 mins of movie ) are uploading now - it should be done by the end of the day - I'll post links when it's finished, and then I'll do some mosaics and a 'best of' with alt info etc.

D

I want to try and add lat/long/alt to the EXIF of the stills, (proper PDS headers...PAH) then upload them all. It's 850+meg of stills - so it'll take a few hours - but it will happen - and probably today.

Doug

Already done....about 5 days ago

Here's altitude against time (mins from launch) . The thick part is actual data points. The thin is rough extrapolation after it hit the GPS 'hole' for cheap GPS I'd say 32km is a fair estimate - 104,000ft

Hopefully we'll have a better figure from the GPS on the avionics board, but I'm not 100% sure.

My stand-alone GPS logger excelled itself. I thought it would crap-out at 18km


926 24/08/2008 15:59:59 5222.0828 52.95 19.1 23919

that's it at 23.9km - the next record

927 24/08/2008 16:33:21 5224.0947 50.7969 52.1 23942

33 mins later - back at 23.9km 16:28 was apogee in the GPS 'hole' of coverage on my logger.

Launch at 1425 BST (1325Z)
Apogee at 1628 BST (1528Z)
Landing at 1712 BST (1612Z)
at 52.443499°N
1.203319°E

Amazingly, with a 10s out of every minute chance - I think we got all three events at least partially as videos.
Not sure of Apogee height yet.

Attached, one cool movie from near apogee, and one cool still during flight, and the scene at landing.

130 mile drive home. Shattered. More funky pics tomorrow - ALL the stills and vids will get uploaded over the next few days ( 3 gig ) . Not got full KML's yet - I may have KML's for the bottom 'half' of the ascent (cheap GPS craps out at 18km ) - but if I had to guess - I would say we ticked the 100,000ft box - we have SO MANY amazing image from altitude.

Kudos to James Coxon for the avionics half ( even if it didn't go to plan, it went enough to plan to get it back ), Ed and Fergus for the epic amount of experience, and Steve for his awesome Radio + Yagi signal finding technique. And Helen, our press officer and outreach coordinator Everyone played their part and it wouldn't have worked without all of them.

Fun times with the avionics - leaving James to troubleshoot while we have some lunch.

At Churchill - heavy rain is now dying off to a drizzle. We think we will be launching later than planned - more like 12 than 11

Right - 0640 - early start - I'm packing up the car and heading out to Cambridge. Keep an eye on http://spacenear.us/tracker/ for tweets, possibly ustream, hopefully live tracking, and an IRC channel. The 'live' images from the top are a pre-loaded jpg, but overlayed with realtime time/gps/altitude data from the payload downlinked as SSTV (couldn't get a webcam / hacked canon to work properly in time to take images for that)

I have the A560 with it's firmware ready to go ( 10s of 320 x 240 x 15fps, then 5 stills, then 30s sleep - looped ) - and a backup A550 with just a 20s looping one image script ready to put on instead if the A560 dies during launch prep ( only one will launch )

The uStreamage will probably be from me ( if it works ) on my Macbook Pro - so I'll try and show you all the things happening after launch - and even try and get the launch itself, but I'll be busy doing launch preps so no promises there.

Doug

Right - less than 24 hrs to go

Keep an eye on http://spacenear.us/tracker/ tomorrow morning - hoping to launch at 1000-1100 UK time ( so 0900-1000 GMT )

Current predict from the Wyoming uni website ( http://weather.uwyo.edu/polar/balloon_traj.html ) is to a few miles west or Norwich ( attached )

Just packing all the kit and tools we might need before getting a reasonably early night - I leave at 0700 tomorrow to get down there.

There are problems with the pipe that chucks the raw imagery online at the moment. There were some post-drive images on 1627 commanded, but not yet downlinked. Not sure about 1626, and 1625 is online.

UMSF is happy to host it.

I was thinking 'pig' and err...'poo'

Well that took AGES!

I'm happy to er.... 'beta test' it

Doug

Oh boy oh boy


http://esamultimedia.esa.int/multimedia/vm...46/target0.html