A group of friends is launching a helium balloon to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Josh Shaffer of the News and Observer wrote a story on it in this morning’s paper.
I am not involved in the project (I’m at the beach now), which kills me because I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. The best I can do is what everyone else can do, which is track the balloon online. Those in Raleigh can see the launch at Horseshoe Farm Park at 8 AM Sunday.
Update 23 August: Success! See the results!
Sadly, we only got 3 packets from the APRS transmitter, the last at 23,695 feet, and none of them got igated. So, the balloon and payload was a complete lose. 🙁
Not to be deterred, however, we went back to Horseshoe Farm Park just before noon and in 45 minutes put together another capsule, parachute and balloon, this time with a Spot satellite GPSr tracker ( http://bit.ly/ncnearspace-take2 ) and launched it. Sadly, the Spot doesn’t report altitude, but it did let us track it all the time except when it was above 65k feet. It ended up coming down in Rocky Mount about 60-65 feet up in a tree! I had brought a ladder and long pole and we used both of them and several 10 foot lengths of PVC pipe and finally after 4 hours we got the parachute and capsule out of the tree! ( http://flic.kr/p/8uCvRC ) It looks like it took about an hour and a half to get up to burst altitude (we’re guessing about 90k feet, but I’m sure that’s inaccurate) and it took some great pictures. Here’s a few of our favorites:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clubjuggler/sets/72157624786512244/
All in all, we spent 16 hours doing this yesterday and had a blast. We will definitely be launching more sometime in the future. You should come help with them!