I am a Engineering college student working on a weather balloon project, in which we are hoping to launch up with a camera on board to try reach the stratosphere. The idea of the camera is to capture footage and images on its journey.

Does anyone have any advice on materials to use for this project? As we will only have a limited budget to work with. Or any other tips and advice on this project if anyone has done it before?

I've seen people do similar things with mobile phones, raspberry PiS and gopro type cameras.

 

How are you intending to recover the data, are you only interested in images?

Oh that ones easy just fill a big balloon with helium.

 

I've purchased surplus weather balloons on ebay but the latex may have degraded over time. They were not particularly robust. So going cheap may not be the best option there, unless you get spares.

The materials are nothing special; it's a matter of cold essentially. Polystyrene foam can provide insulation.

 

Weather stations launch two balloons a day (12 and 24 gmt). Excellent quality.We went to such a station and got the envelope, the helium, the launch service, the radio tracking from the weather station, for free or for little money.

 

A balloon must integrate in the air traffic: radar echo, parachute, maybe notification to air men, hardware digestible by a fan, and so on. It must also integrate in the radiocomm traffic; again, weather stations have their proper frequency bands which we could use outside their usual flight window, this helps a lot.

 

Finding a balloon fallen somewhere on the ground is very difficult, even with radar tracking that happened to work, so transmit the data in flight, don't rely on data storage. A balloon commonly flies 200km away, so transmission isn't obvious even if high above the horizon, and you lose the link far before touchdown, say at 10km altitude. People finding a fallen balloon tend to keep it for themselves, so writing "danger - radioactivity" on it is better than "I'm a science experiment, please call my owners".

 

You have to decide if the equipment must work at ambient temperature (like -70°C, very difficult for batteries) or if you provide it more comfort. Don't forget condensation on optics.

 

Experiments on stratospheric balloons by amateurs have been done thousands of times, so just check the literature. Would you prefer something more original than taking pictures? Measure the disruptive voltage as a function of the air pressure? Collect micrometeorites? Detect cosmic rays?

I am a Engineering college student working on a weather balloon project, in which we are hoping to launch up with a camera on board to try reach the stratosphere. The idea of the camera is to capture footage and images on its journey.

 

Does anyone have any advice on materials to use for this project? As we will only have a limited budget to work with. Or any other tips and advice on this project if anyone has done it before?

This high school group has been doing such launches for at least the last year and publishing their results and pics @ SpaceWeather.com. I'm sure they would be happy to share their expertise. >> Earth to Sky Calculus

 

Spaceweather.com