Payload Recovered!

If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that my friends and I put a balloon into near space. You’ll also know that we didn’t get the payload back immediately.

Well, we’ve got great news; the payload was successfully recovered!

We gathered a team of 3 bicyclists and 5 hikers and went to Henry Coe Park today. The bicyclists made it to the landing site well before us hikers, and they found our payload.

Fortunately, we had some GPS coordinates come in over APRS on Saturday, which made the search much more likely to succeed. The bikers found the payload in a tree.

Considering how far off course the balloon went, it’s remarkable that we were able to recover the thing.

When we got back to the cars, we disassembled the still-intact payload.

Everything was in remarkably good condition, so we took a look at the images; we’ve got 9 gigabytes of photograph; a little under 3000 pictures in total. A SunSPOT in the science payload was also able to record some 600 sensor readings.

We’re totally swamped with sensor readings and photographs, so I can’t post everything here (yet!). I’ve found a few images I consider to be some of our best; I’m still trying to find somewhere to put the rest.

The balloon is still tied to the jeep.

And we're off!

This was very close to the highest altitude we reached.

The entire San Francisco Bay is visible from up here.

I’ve got thousands more, but I’m going to stop uploading for now, until I can find some sort of sane hosting that we all agree on.

I’ll be posting some our sensor data and more pictures later, and hopefully a full breakdown of the project.