Genius! Not a mile from where I worked this summer, Cambridge University students earlier this month launched Nova 1, a meteorogical balloon juryrigged with a digital camera, GPS, mobile phone and radio transmitter. The thing went 32 km straight up and took 857 photos at 15-second intervals, some of which show some clear curves. it returned to Earth via parachute, landing 45 km due East a little under three hours later.
They’ve turned the positioning data into KML, though their link is a bit iffy. Here is a proper network link for it. The result looks like this:
What I’d really love to see is a time-enabled path with screen overlays for all 857 photos. It’d be trivial to do. I can’t wait for Nova 2.
wow! neat link. just for fun here is some code to make a movie out of it: (be nice !)
#fetch all .jpg images:
wget -r -l1 –no-parent -A.jpg http://www.srcf.ucam.org/%7Ecuspaceflight/nova1gallery/images/
#this looks better
#re-size and make into an .mpg movie, but with a 10ms delay between frames:
convert -delay 10 -resize 320x -size 320×240 *.jpg test.mpg
#and just for fun it took our new machine (Dual Dual-core Opteron, linux 2.6.16, 4Gb RAM):
real 4m0.080s
user 3m41.206s
sys 0m17.045s
#and my puny dual-xeon, linux 2.6.16, 1Gb RAM – without the interframe delay:
real 9m43.805s
user 3m27.233s
sys 0m28.902s
Have fun.
Another stratospheric ballooon – Cygnus-2 launched in Poland in June. It reached 28.8km and travelled 23.8km.
There is a screenshot showing the flight track in GE (no real kml though)
http://moo.pl/~tygrys/balloon/