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]

Re Treo's and other potential offerings. They are great end user devices but trust me on this cos I do this for a living - you will encounter pain beyond belief if you try to develop any network oriented software worth attempting on any hand held platform that isn't based on Windows Mobile. I am a major, major fan of free (as in beer and as in speech) software and open source \ collaborative \ what not software but when it comes to hand held systems the only open platform worth working on today is Microsoft's. It seems mad to say it but their development environment is the most open and developer friendly system that you will find today. I know I can develop a GPS aware application (using either a built in GPS or one connected via Serial\IR\Bluetooth) that periodically (every 15-30 seconds) posts updated position data via a GPRS\UMTS\EVDO data connection, or via SMS, to a remote server of some sort using totally freely available tools for development and testing (via emulators for the platform and for the GPS). I've tried to do the same with Palm, Symbian (Nokia) and Linux (Motorola) and have been cut off at the knees every time.

Just my 2c.

[ElkGroveDan]

Re Treo's and other potential offerings. They are great end user devices but trust me on this cos I do this for a living - you will encounter pain beyond belief if you try to develop any network oriented software worth attempting on any hand held platform that isn't based on Windows Mobile.

It is a Windows based Treo. Sorry I didn't make that clear. http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo700w/

FWIW I used it for two or three months but hated some of its features and went with a Blackberry instead. I can probably sell it for $200-$250 on eBay, but I'm still willing to donate it if it will work. I'll even include the 2G SD card.