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

[jamescanvin]

Your wish is my command...

In each of these I've used the same orientations of the gondola when each picture is taken to make them somewhat comparable. In each case there are 15 images from each camera. Also included is the coverage after one shot from each camera and two percentages indicating the total coverage and the coverage in the lower hemisphere (as the upper one should be mostly black sky ). Of course this is very biased as a lot of pixels near nadir represent very little solid angle in this projection but hopefully it tells us something. The cameras are arranged so they have about the same amount of overlap between the images (5 degrees or so).

1) Similar to before two cameras, upper in landscape, lower in portrait and pointed down at 40 degrees. 61% 86%



2) Both cameras in portrait one pointed down at 45 degrees. 65% 91%



3) Both cameras in landscape one pointed down at 35 degrees. 54% 71%




Sims using three cameras to follow.