Author Archive for Geoff

Tons of views!

There has been a recent surge in views on youtube! We just broke 36,000 hits!

Geoff eats the Twinkie from space :)

We sent up a Twinkie and a marshmallow on the top of the payload capsule to see what would happen to them at 90,000 feet altitude.
Well, as you may have guessed, other than a semi-frozen filling, nothing happened to the Twinkie at all! The marshmallow did expand a bit but also tasted “normal” 🙂

CHDK photos from the Canon G9

Here are some photos from the Canon G9 that was poking out of the payload.
The G9 was running the CHDK intervalometer script that I wrote a while back…

Balloon flight path

Here is a screen shot of the flight data… I’ll post a Google Earth KML file later when I figure out how to generate it from the raw telemetry data.

Note the few minutes spent falling over the Pacific Ocean!

Some initial data – high altitude balloon temperature graph.

The Arduino worked perfectly and took 5755 temperature readings inside and outside the capsule.
The capsule was not air tight but still acted as a pretty good buffer for the internal air temperature.

First HAPPy photo from near space!

Our first photo from space 🙂  Taken around 70,000 feet looking towards Thousand Oaks.

BALLOON RECOVERED!!!!!!!!!!!

We just got the balloon back. It landed on a soft patch of grass. We will post raw video and pics ASAP with an edited video coming soon. Stay tuned as more content is released. We also saw it land and a partner might have videoed the land

Balloon is falling!!!!!!

we are retrieving it now

We just left the launch site

we are on the move tracking the balloon. Keep an eye on Twitter and après.fi the tracking call sign is kd0pfn.

We are set for tomorrow

After the scrub earlier today we had time to fix the aprs unit which was not working properly prior to the failed attempt. We are good for tomorrow in Port Hueneme at 9:00 am. Hopefully we will be able to get it in the air this time.