High altitude balloon payload, from Sable-3 discussion Options

[djellison]

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...20&start=20

We began talkin about a UMSF balloon - and who know what might happen if enough people think about something hard enough, thoroughly enough and long enough.

How's about this as a starting point.
http://vpizza.org/~jmeehan/balloon/ with http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/part101.html as an important regulatory start point (I'm going to look up the UK regs for this as well)

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cuspaceflight/nova1launch.html is also very impressive - all done in the UK

This http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/...video_podc.html is particularly impressive - I like the multiple-cameras slant.

Anyway - thought I'd get a thread going - this is an idea I like too much to let it gather dust in a corner - the one thing that I think would be nice to achieve is self-portraiture of some sort - think Beagle 2's WAM etc....perhaps in a corner of the FOV of one of/the imaging system. What sort of limit's should we set ourselves? 1kg 10x10x20cm? (sort of 2U Cubesat-on-a-diet budget)

Doug

[helvick]

Things to bear in mind.

Not all digital cameras have a time lapse \ "intervalometer" mode. Whatever models are considered have to have that capability either built in or available cheaply (in terms of mass and money) as an add on.

A reasonably wide angle lens would be nice - most Compact Digicams have a wide end that's equivalent to ~ 35mm focal length on a classic 35mmm SLR providing approximately 55x37deg FOV but some have a more useful 28mm wide end giving a ~65x46deg FOV that covers about 50% more solid angle.

Storage capacity depends very much on how new the camera is - storage above 2GB may not be possible on older SD only devices for example. 1000 7Megapixel jpg shots stored in fine mode would be just about 2GB I reckon so that would be OK (just).

I think that a 2 camera approach is a very good idea. I'm torn between having them pointed in such a way that stitched panoramas are possible versus having them pointed so that we optimize the probability of getting a wider range of individual shots.
As far as power is concerned something like the Tekkeon MyPower MP3300 would give us 40whrs for 320grammes which is probably way more than we need for just the cameras but we still have to build in some sort of tracker\GPS unit and a transmitter which will both need juice too. Taht 40whrs is probably optimistic, no doubt there are losses in the voltage conversion circuitry and we'll probably have temperature related power issues so the margin with that might not actually be all that high.

Anybody got any information on a tracker\transmitter so we can find the thing once it comes crashing back to mother earth?

[ElkGroveDan]

Anybody got any information on a tracker\transmitter so we can find the thing once it comes crashing back to mother earth?

I tracked down the Sable-3 equipment. I'd say some of that would be a fine starting point due to it's proven abilities

The tracking device comes in a kit and is inexpensive:
http://www.byonics.com/microtrak/mt300.php

Here are some balloons
http://www.scientificsales.com/SearchResults.asp