Photos like this:
How did he do it, you ask?
With this:
According to this article Adam simply …
What really amazes me is that after rising to a stratospheric height of over 100,000 feet and the bursting of the balloon, Adam's little payload drifted back down to Earth under a parachute and landed a mere 30 miles away from the launch site!...bought a standard Canon A570 camera on eBay around 18 months ago when he first had the idea for the project.
He placed it in an insulated box along with a small video camera, two temperature sensors, two high-performance solar panels, a tracking device, microprocessor and radio.
The student then attached it to a high-altitude two metre latex balloon with a parachute - and named his contraption ‘HABE 5’.
Following the launch, he tracked the balloon as it climbed to three times the height of a commercial plane before it burst and landed in Broadway, Worcestershire - 30 miles from his home.
How did he find it? Well, the above article says he had a GPS device on board plus a radio.
Must have been a nice radio that could transmit 30 miles over land but I couldn't find out what sort of radio it was or what sort of receiver he used to locate the signal.He used a GPS tracker similar to a car's satellite-navigation unit to follow its progress and located it with a radio transmitter following its fall back to earth, having reached speeds of more than 150mph.
I was also impressed with Adam's choice of power source: “two high performance solar panels.” I would have thought that, say, a half dozen AA batteries would have been much easier and cheaper or even one of those rechargeable battery packs like the ones the radio control modelers use. I also tried to find a photo of these high performance solar panels that Adam used but I couldn't. They must have been really high performance so were too small to be visible in this launch photo:
More photos of Adam's edge-of-space exploits can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acudworth/
And his own blog can be found here:
http://habe.acudworth.co.uk/
And, it's a good thing that Adam used that nifty foam insulation …
… to protect his camera and electronics from the -55°C temperatures of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere because, according to the camera's manual its operating range only goes down to 0°C.
I wasn't able to find out how Adam triggered the Canon A570 camera to take the photos from a 20-mile altitude. I don't see anything in the manual that says the camera can be fired without physically pressing the shutter release button and I don't see any mechanical linkage or servo-mechanism connected to the camera in the above photo. And, the manual says nothing about any sort of feature which would fire the camera at certain intervals automatically. So, I would think there would either have to be a timer on board plus servo gear or some sort of radio control equipment but an RC unit that works at a distance of 20 miles can't be found at any hobby shops that I know of. He could have set A570 the camera in video mode before launching but the article says he also had a video camera on board so that doesn't seem likely but even if he did use video mode, according to this review of the Canon A570 camera, the video mode would only run for 1 hour maximum and his flight was said to take 2½ hours to reach its 20 mile height.
But, it turns out, Adam's feat is nothing new. If you scroll down on this wiki page you can see photos taken by others using similar equipment.
One was taken in the USA a few years ago by the Kalamazoo College “Make Stuff Club.” Their methods at least seem somewhat closer to believability to me though still in the incredible category. They used only a video camera which was turned on before launch and a siren to help them locate the payload after landing. But, it still only landed a few miles away from the launch site which seems rather amazing in light of jet streams said to be located at 20-50,000 feet altitudes.
Jet stream refs:
http://www.intellicast.com/National/Wind/JetStream.aspx
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-jet-stream.htm
Other Kalmazoo College refs:
http://balloondogs.shutterfly.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6GnP6qs2Bk
The other high altitude photo on the above wiki page was credited to Justin Hamel and Chris Thompson but I couldn't find much information on how they were taken other than this site:
http://www.georgiefriedman.com/Flight_V.html
I would think that government aviation authorities would take a dim view of teenagers launching contraptions that pass willy-nilly through the paths of flying passenger aircraft but I guess it's OK with them.
Is it really this easy to explore 100,000+ altitudes? If so, I would also think there would be thousands of others doing similar projects but I don't see them on YouTube or elsewhere.
Could there be something especially brilliant about Kalamazoo College students? They are known to “produce more Peace Corps volunteers per capita than any other U.S. academic institution.” Perhaps the rumors are true regarding Peace Corps = CIA?
IMO the idea being pushed here is that exploring space is so easy even teenagers can do it with inexpensive gadgets and homemade hacked hardware. Maybe this is to counter the increasing public awareness that the Apollo missions were way beyond the existing technology of the 1960s-70s?