Many people have likely heard about attempts to send video cameras into space using cheap weather balloons, now two teenage boys from Toronto Canada have taken that concept a step further. The AFP newswire is reporting that the two boys have sent a toy man they built out LEGO’s into space and back and have videotaped his journey.
Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both just seventeen years old, ordered a weather balloon from an unnamed web supply site, constructed a reasonable facsimile of a human being out of LEGO blocks (holding a Canadian flag), hooked the two together, along with four cameras and a cell phone, and after filling the balloon with helium that they got from a party supply store, released the whole works from a soccer field near where they live. The balloon craft sailed aloft for 94 minutes, before returning to Earth.
The two told AFP that the phone had to go along because it had GPS capabilities, though the signal from the phone disappeared after the balloon and man reached an altitude of four miles. When that happened, the teens said they went into the house to make lunch while they waited. Once the balloon reached a certain altitude, the pressure of space caused it to burst, which is how the craft came back down to Earth. In this case, the two said they wanted to make sure their little man and the other equipment wasn’t damaged, so they added a little toy rocket parachute as well. Once the phone had drifted to a lower elevation, it sent a signal announcing its return that allowed them to resume tracking its descent.
As for choosing the right day, they two said they consulted the weather channel and other web sites to pick a day when things would be calm.
Once the whole contraption fell to Earth it was easily found by tracking the GPS signal sent from the cell phone. For the two teens, that meant traveling just seventy five miles from where it was launched. To their delight, the parachute worked perfectly and everything aboard their craft survived the trip.
Space-Travel magazine found the whole mission unique enough to highlight the duo’s success in a recent article, calling the whole project and results rather amazing.
Amazing is surely the word considering the whole project added up to just about $500. Thus we have gone from billion dollar government sponsored space exploration programs to amateur projects that teenagers can undertake in their spare time, in a span of just fifty years.