Near Space Adventure: Flight 2 – Post Flight
by admin on Oct.31, 2009, under Technical
MISSION SUCCESS!
This mission was a complete success. We are in complete shock over the pictures that our digital camera captured during the flight. You can view them below. If you would like to see how we prepared for this mission, please visit Near Space Adventure: Flight 2.
Special thanks:
We would like to thank a number of people who helped make this flight a success:
- Our families
- Our friends
- Jeff Smith at Airgas
- The kind family who allowed us to launch from their property and helped us tremendously with the launch preparations.
Other thoughts:
It’s obvious by looking at the photos that we finally reached our goals. Not only did we definitely reach 100k feet, but we also managed to photograph the earth from an altitude that really allows the viewer to see the curvature of our beautiful earth.
We approached this opportunity to launch thinking that we had tied up every lose end. In reality, we learned some lessons the hard way. Example: Launching in the rain is not pleasant, and water-saturated objects such as parachutes weigh more than normal. 
Flight pictures:
We have an unbelievable amount of photos from the “edge of space.” I’m still at a loss for words over these pictures. The quality of these photos has been adjusted for easy web viewing. If you would like a full-quality print, please comment below, and I will contact you. Enjoy!
Flight path:
November 2nd, 2009 on 8:16 pm
sweet man! lookin good! made great progress! we need a little bigger balloon if its gonna lift me in a space suit!!!
November 3rd, 2009 on 10:26 am
Justin,
Congrats on a successful flight! Awesome pics – nice job!! My brother and I down here in Texas are planning to perform the same type of flight in a few months – smaller balloon (350grm) – more in line with what the MIT students did. Quick questions. In one of your photos on flight 2 – the filling of the balloon, i see you have some sort of stopper with a pressure fitting? Can you tell me were you purchased it or if you made it, could you shoot me a few detailed photos of the device and some instructions & material list so that I might create one of my own. I noticed a water jug which I am assuming you used to check the lift of your balloon tied to this plug?. Also, on your camera – what shutter speed did you have it set too? Did you turn off the LCD to save battery power and if so – how did you do this? How long was your flight…and how close was the landing site to your original calculated landing site. Did you call the FAA ahead of time? Sorry for all te questions!!! Again – Congrats – Nice job!!!
Thanks
C. Mason
November 3rd, 2009 on 1:18 pm
Chris Mason,
Thanks! It was an incredible high when we saw the pictures for the first time.
Where in Texas do you live?
We did make that filling device. I am not at liberty to discuss in detail how we made it because my project partner is responsible for the idea. I will ask him and we will go from there.
However, I will say that I believe you will not want to use it for such a small balloon. It does add weight. Weight is your enemy.
I suggest for a 350 gram balloon that you just tie it. We tied our 600 gram balloon for the first flight and it worked out perfectly.
As far as the camera, we used a Cannon A470 just like the MIT kids. We installed CHDK which allowed us to configure the camera to take a string of pictures at a user-defined interval. I did not adjust, set, or otherwise alter the camera’s shutter speed, aperture, or any other settings. The LCD cannot be turned off completely, but you can instruct the camera to turn it off after 1 second of viewing time after each picture is taken.
In my experience with this camera so far, it will work for probably 4-5 hours. You MUST MUST MUST use lithium batteries. They are the only ones that will work in the cold temps of the upper atmosphere.
We didn’t contact the FAA because our payload is under 4 pounds. For more information on this, please visit: http://www.eoss.org/pubs/far_annotated.htm.
Most of the tools and resources that we used to accomplish our goals are listed here: http://justinhamel.com/2009/09/23/near-space-adventure/
Our balloon and payload did not go where we expected. Although I must mention that our parachute was partially collapsed by the balloon on descent. So it never would have made it anyway.
On the first launch, it landed 6 miles from where we thought it was going to land. On that attempt, we over-filled the balloon… so I can’t give you a real answer.
We are going to launch again on this upcoming Sunday, November 8, 2009. I will keep you updated on how the predicted trajectory and the actual flight matched up (or didn’t).
The jug of water was used to measure lift.
Thanks for commenting,
Justin Hamel
November 4th, 2009 on 11:23 am
Thanks for sharing. Looks like loads of fun.
November 4th, 2009 on 6:18 pm
Justin,
Thanks for the Reply and the information! We live down here near Houston, Texas. We plan to launch in the month of December or January. We are still gathering the various items needed. We are really inspired by your photos – they are truly awesome. Keep up the good work and good luck on your next flight – we’ll be waiting for your next set of photos!! I’ll keep you updated on our flight.
Thanks Again!!
November 5th, 2009 on 10:52 pm
Chris Mason,
I lived in The Woodlands for about 5 years and a year in Conroe. What area are you in?
Please do keep me updated on your flight. I’m very excited to hear more about your flight details. What do you plan to do?
Also, I talked to my project partner (His name is also Chris), and he gave me a GO to tell you about our simple filling mechanism.
I will take some photos for you. However, I still suggest that you tie your balloon due to weight constraints.
Let me know if I can answer any questions for you as well. I spent HOURS AND HOURS researching. I might as well share the knowledge.
-Justin Hamel
November 6th, 2009 on 6:38 am
Justin,
Thanks for the offer for sharing information!! We’ll definetly take you up on this. We live in Sugar Land Texas. Our first flight will consist of just a single canon a470 camera – 8gb mem card. A Boost phone with Accutracking and a 350grm balloon. Since we have 2 balloons, we plan to first do a tethered flight for a systems and camera placement checkout. We’ve got most of the items required. Our largest worry is the Gulf Coast. We will more than likely have to drive west or Northwest towards San Antonio or Austin for a suitable launch site. This is why we are interested in the Balloons web site accuracy. It would be nice to drop our payload in an area that would be conducive in finding it. I spoke to a gentleman in Austin that launched a few weeks ago. His payload ended up in the East Texas Pineywoods and he had some difficulty getting to and retrieving his payload. We are hoping to drop ours some where southwest of Sugar land towards Victoria. This area is mostly just wide, flat farm land – not many tree or water features. If we do have a successful retrieval, we’ll probably follow your idea and go with a larger balloon for height and for a quicker flight. For this initial flight, we’ve got several worries. One is with this small balloon, the flight time will be long…which equates to long drift/distances. The other worry is the Shutter speed and Blur that might occur due to the swing motion of the payload. We are trying to figure out how we might offset the swing without adding a lot of weight or adjust the shutter speeds. You had mentioned that you just went with the normal camera settings…any other suggestions? Thinking ahead, we would like to perhaps launch a small lightweight video camera and take some film of a flight.
We’ll definitly keep you in the loop. Again, good luck with your Nov 8th flight.
Chris Mason
November 6th, 2009 on 7:09 pm
Chris Mason,
So I did a little math for 350 gram balloons.
I assume that your camera, cellphone, payload container, and parachute weighs 1.6 pounds.
If you fill your balloon with 51 cu. ft. of helium, that should result it your payload reaching an altitude of 92k feet.
51 cu. ft. of helium would provide you with .98 lbs of free lift. That will give you an ascension rate of 700 ft/min give or take.
I highly suggest using the parachute that we used. It is incredibly sturdy, but also light weight. I suggest purchasing the 5 ft parachute. The 6 ft is not that much more expensive, but I think that it will not work properly without the proper amount of load. Additionally, it might slow your descent too much.
Let me know if this helps…
-Justin Hamel
November 8th, 2009 on 3:16 pm
Wow –
Thanks for the Calcs!! We were thnking at 65 cu ft…but we’ll go with your 51 Cu ft suggestion. We already purchased a parachute from Kaymont. We have not recieved it yet…but may consider purcahsing the one you suggested. I wanted to see the chute we purchased first and do a few test runs on it befor we abandon it for a better one like the one you are suggesting. Thanks again for the info!! We’ll keep you updated on our progress and look forward to your Nov 11th launch.
November 8th, 2009 on 4:15 pm
Chris Mason,
I’m glad I could help with the calculations. Let me know if I can be of any more assistance in that area.
My project partner, Chris, and I built a new filler nozzle last night. It took a new hours to make, but it’s solid. I will take pictures of it for you on Wednesday. It’s not too hard to make, it’s mostly time on the lathe.
The new nozzle thing weighs 2 oz. The original one weighed 4.3 oz.
I look forward to learning more about your project. What are your goals?
-Justin Hamel
November 9th, 2009 on 7:58 am
2oz – That’s significantly lighter and may would work in our configuration. Good job! Look forward to the photos. Goals…our goal is to just take photos of the earth and the curvature/blackness of space. As mentioned before, if we have a successful first flight, we plan to go bigger and higher with video.. much like you are doing. One possible future endeavor would be to fly at night and take photos of city lights/matrix… and perhaps even some photos of the earth with the moon on the horizon/background. We are not really interested in distance flights…just unique photos from the upper atmosphere. How about you and Chris – any future flight ideas?
November 9th, 2009 on 1:46 pm
Chris Mason,
We have talked about getting involved with our local school districts to share our experience and strengthen classroom learning.
I imagine that doing this on your own doesn’t really create many opportunities for useful data collection. I think that with the input of a few classrooms, we could come up with some cool science experiments to send up.
I’m sure that opportunities will present themselves.
January 5th, 2010 on 6:28 pm
Well we launched and 5 minutes into the flight we lost contact with our GPS phone. We had a AA battery charger attached and think it caused some sort of fault protection to occurr in the phone and it just turned it off. We had encountered the same issue during some tests but we thought we solved the issue by tightening the battery contacts…but it got us I guess. All of our hardware and parachute was lost. We’ve since aquired new hardware…camera and 2 phones this time. We are going to attempt another launch in 3 weeks but need some of your help. We beleive our payload and parachute weighed about 1.8 lbs. When you say 1lb of free lift…does this mean to have a jug filled to exactly 2.8 lbs…if the ballon lift this then you have 1lb of free lift? Also, could you do the math again on the ascent rate with a 350 gm ballon and weight of 1.8 lbs. Thanks
January 6th, 2010 on 1:27 pm
Chris Mason,
I highly suggest using a Spot personal tracker. Last i checked, they are about a hundred bucks. Cell phones scare me for this kind of project…
As far as free lift goes, if you have a flight package (ie balloon, parachute, payload) that weighs 1 lb, you are going to have to have more than one pound of lift to make it rise. So if you have 1.5 lbs of lift, then you have .5 lbs of free lift. So, yes. Your jug theory is correct.
I will get the calculations to you soon.
Do you have your project documented? I would love to read about what you did. We can all learn something from each other.
January 6th, 2010 on 3:00 pm
Chris Mason,
Balloon – 350 grams
Total payload weight – 1.8 lbs
Nozzle lift – 2.79 lbs
Free lift – .99 lbs
Peak altitude – 90,000 feet
Ascent speed – 780 ft/min
Time to burst – 1.9 hours
Helium required – 54 cubic feet
Balloon diameter at launch – 4.7 feet
This data came from a program called Liftwin.
The data above assumes that you are at 0 feet above sea level, and the air temp is 60 degrees. Now this is not rocket science, so exact measurements are not necessary. If it’s 70 degrees outside, your ascent speed changes to 770 feet/min. Generally speaking, it’s better to launch in cold weather as you get more bang for your buck. However, launching in warm weather is absolutely acceptable. The catch is that warmer weather requires you to use more helium to get the desired free lift to get your desired ascent speed. However, more helium in your balloon = lower possible max altitude.
I hope this helps. I would love to help even more if possible. Send me an email at justin@justinhamel.com as I would enjoy speaking to you on the phone about your project.
August 21st, 2010 on 7:41 am
Did you turn off the LCD to save battery power and if so – how did you do this?
August 22nd, 2010 on 10:15 pm
Evan,
So far we use Canon A470 model cameras because they are cheap, and the sensor quality is great.
The camera is capable of doing so much more than what is available through the stock options, so we use CHDK to make other features available to us.
To answer your question, I read that the lcd power and the sensor power are connected, so if you turn one off, then you turn both off, and I need the sensor. However, there was an option that I found that allows you to turn the backlight off a millisecond after it pops on, that saves power, but we don’t use it.
We just turn the sounds and the flash off.
If you have any more questions, let me know.