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

[djellison]

Well - my idea of a front-door peep hole lens to get fish-eye for the GMC isn't going to work. On both the old catcam, and the new 3 MP cameras - they're FOV is too large to crop into the round FOV from the lens. So it's a WAM technique that'll have to work.

The normal cameras come apart fairly easily and I was able to hard-solder them to a housing and run them off 2 C cells instead of the two AA's that fit internally. I was also able to strip the flash and it's capacitor off the circuitboard with no ill effect - and I've been able to remove and re-attache the ribbon that drives the LCD with no problems as well. The shutter is actually on a tiny PCB of its own and that will be fine in terms of wiring something up. The trigger circuit that I thought would do the trick may not be up to it - it actually takes a 12v supply which seems excessive.

Current plan for imaging.

• Find a new triggering mechanism
• Wire up cat-cam as it is for C-Cell operation (it will happily do image after image at whatever interval I ask for as long as I want all on it's own...I'm not bothered about getting GMC and the other cameras in sync) and do some life-testing of a 4000 mAh C-cell with it - pointing at trees and clouds (appropriate target)
• Shout at the postal service because I don't have my wide angle mirrors, parachute, radio or half my order of electronic bits and pieces.
• Carve up these new polystyrene gondola's to make them an appropriate size, glue with a hot glue gun and then find some alu tape and possibly further insulation.
• Calibrate GMC and normal cameras. (let's call them FOC - Flight Observation Cameras - FOC A, B, C...from top to bottom) Find their FOV's and figure out a means to mount them. The way the l see it - A can mount in a side wall, C in the floor - but B is more difficult without cutting a lot of polystyrene or putting the camera almost outside.

Gizmo has a thing for Elysium and Chryse... she reached up like a Mearcat and pulled the pin I put in at the V1 landing site

Doug

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