Teenager floats £30 camera into space to capture Earth’s curvature
A teenager has floated a £30 camera he bought on eBay into space to capture amazing images of the Earth. They look like they could be the latest images taken from a multi-million pound NASA satellite but these stunning snaps were actually taken from a £30 camera bought off eBay by a teenager, The Telegraph reported.
Adam Cudworth, 19, managed to capture these incredible views of the earth from space using little more than a balloon and his second-hand camera.
And while NASA spends hundreds of millions of pounds each year on high tech satellites Adam, whose scientific background consists of only a Physics A-Level, achieved his incredible feat – on a £200 budget.
The student spent 40 hours working on a home-made device consisting of a box containing a GPS, radio and microprocessor – which soared to an incredible height of 110,210 ft when he released it last Thursday. After taking two-and-a-half hours to float over 20 miles up into the earth’s stratosphere, his contraption captured out-of-this-world images giving breathtaking views of our planet from space. Adam used a GPS tracker similar to a car’s sat-nav to follow its progress and an attached radio transmitter to find it when it fell back to earth having reached speeds of over 150mph.
The teenager, from Ombersley, Worcs, said, “It’s just a bit of hobby really, I just wanted to set myself a challenge – but I’m amazed at the results. I saw a guy who did a similar thing a couple of years back and I just wanted to recreate them – but better. I have no background in astrophysics or anything like that, I’m just an engineering student. People think its something that costs millions of pounds but I’ve proved you can do it on just a £200 budget.”
Adam bought a standard Canon A570 camera off eBay a year-and-a-half 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 Nottingham University student then attached it to a high-altitude two metre latex balloon with a parachute – and named his contraption HABE 5. daily times monitor
Adam Cudworth, 19, managed to capture these incredible views of the earth from space using little more than a balloon and his second-hand camera.
And while NASA spends hundreds of millions of pounds each year on high tech satellites Adam, whose scientific background consists of only a Physics A-Level, achieved his incredible feat – on a £200 budget.
The student spent 40 hours working on a home-made device consisting of a box containing a GPS, radio and microprocessor – which soared to an incredible height of 110,210 ft when he released it last Thursday. After taking two-and-a-half hours to float over 20 miles up into the earth’s stratosphere, his contraption captured out-of-this-world images giving breathtaking views of our planet from space. Adam used a GPS tracker similar to a car’s sat-nav to follow its progress and an attached radio transmitter to find it when it fell back to earth having reached speeds of over 150mph.
The teenager, from Ombersley, Worcs, said, “It’s just a bit of hobby really, I just wanted to set myself a challenge – but I’m amazed at the results. I saw a guy who did a similar thing a couple of years back and I just wanted to recreate them – but better. I have no background in astrophysics or anything like that, I’m just an engineering student. People think its something that costs millions of pounds but I’ve proved you can do it on just a £200 budget.”
Adam bought a standard Canon A570 camera off eBay a year-and-a-half 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 Nottingham University student then attached it to a high-altitude two metre latex balloon with a parachute – and named his contraption HABE 5. daily times monitor
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