Teen sends balloon into space to capture stunning earth pics
10 Sep 2012
A teenager has bettered NASA, taking snaps of the earth, at a fraction of what it costs the space agency. The UK teenager has captured stunning images of the planet by floating a second-hand camera worth £30 into space using a balloon.
The photos could easily pass off as images taken from a multi-million pound NASA satellite but Adam Cudworth used only a balloon and a second-hand camera to capture amazing views of the earth from space.
Cudworth, 19, with Physics A-Level as his only background in science, achieved the incredible feat, on a £200-budget, the Daily Telegraph, reported.
Cudworth spent 40 hours putting together a home-made device comprising a box containing a GPS, radio and microprocessor, which soared to an incredible height of 110,210 ft (33,592 metres) when he released it last Thursday.
The contraption he released soared over 20 miles into the earth's stratosphere in two-and-a-half hours capturing breathtaking views of our planet from space.
Cudworth used a GPS tracker much like the sat-nav used in cars to follow the device's progress and an attached radio transmitter to track it when it fell back to earth having reached speeds of over 150mph.