Every once in a while I get a hair-brained scheme that I can actually sell to some unsuspecting person. Like the weather balloon! My son was looking for a science experiment, and I was looking for a challenge. And now we are building a weather balloon.
We will be launching a 1200 gram balloon into near space, sometime between mid-Jan and mid-Feb 2012. Near space is an awesome place... you can see the earth's curvature, elements of the atmosphere, etc. It's really cold out there, too, with temperatures around- 50 C.
We will be sending up one or more Arduino boards in our balloon instrument package, to measure altitude, GPS coordinates, temperature, etc. Our second instrument package will include an APRS solution as well as a 2m radio beacon. Finally, thanks to the generosity of the folks at GoPro, we'll have a GoPro Hero HD on board to record the whole trip.
In this blog, I will be recording our progress. So keep up with it to watch as we design, build, test and launch.
73 de K7JTO
