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]

Stunning work with those coverage sims James.

The coverage question and whether we should try for three cameras leads me back to some research that we need to close out on. We know that some of the mid range Digicams (Some of the Canon PowerShots (S3is, S5is , 570) and some Casios have an internal time-lapse\intervalometer mode that is hugely useful. What we really need is to find a camera that meets the following:

Must have features:
Lightweight: <200g ? If we want to fly three cameras then we really should be looking for <133g
Time-Lapse mode \ Intervalometer _or_ a lightweight trigger circuit
Capability to be powered by external DC source
Fully automatic exposure control (this is a given in a digicam)

Desirable Features
Low cost: The cameras are very likely to be consumables in this exercise so it would be smarter to select a cheap one.
Wide Angle.
High resolution
Good optics

Any other suggestions?

Doug - My Fujitsu Siemens Loox-T is not responding to intensive CPR so I've given it to someone better qualiied to try and recover it. In the meantime I'm trying to scam a replacement out of my various contacts. If all else fails I'll buy sufficient kit for the cause. I reckon I need about a week to get the code to send GPRS and SMS GPS coordinates working, fortunately I don't need a working GPS enabled device to develop and test that so we should have a high level of confidence in that system fairly soon even if I haven't nailed down the hardware.