MY ARDUINO WENT TO SPACE!!! PICTURES AND DATA TO PROVE IT!!!

Hello Everyone,

Well normally I would post this on my microcontroller blog, but I think this is general enough (not that my microcontroller blog is technical in anyway), to include here. I want to talk about launching my Arduino microntroller and sensors into SPACE, well to be specific to 30km altitude, or about 3 times the height that a transatlantic flight flies at.

My system:
On my microcontroller blog I had posted about getting myself an Arduino microcontroller, basically a very small, very cheap computer; a GPS chip to measure position, altitude and speed; a temperature and pressure sensor; and a microSD card device to store data to. With these components wired up to my Arduino I wrote some code to log the GPS data and the temperature and pressure data to a microSD card two times per second for as long as the system had power.
That covers the system, if you want a bit more information check out my microcontroller blog at http://justinbeckers-microcontrollerfuntime.blogspot.ca/2013/02/building-gps-temperature-and-pressure.html.

The Launch:

This term of University I am a teaching assistant for the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences course EAS327: Environmental Instrumentation. In this course, students learn about electronics, about designing and building environmental sensors, and gain practical experience with systems such as dataloggers, weather stations, GPS, and a variety of environmental sensors.

This year, we teamed up with the University of Alberta ISSET (Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology)  to launch a high altitude balloon into the upper atmosphere.
As our course is an environmental instrumentation course we decided to launch my arduino and sensors as well as two thermistors (resistors whose resistance is a function of temperature) to measure the temperature. These two thermistors were quickly built by the course professor, Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh, with whom I did some undergraduate work back in 2007/08.  The idea is that the students will use the temperature, pressure and GPS data to write a report for the course. Dr. Kavanaugh also had a GoPro 2 camera to launch with the balloon to take pictures every 5 seconds.

Okay, enough background, let's get to the actual launch.

On Sunday, April 7, 2013, we launched the balloon from the University of Alberta. We filled the balloon with helium so that it can lift the payload (the arduino, the go pro, parachute and some other items for the ISSET group. The balloon ascends and as it ascends it expands because the air pressure outside the balloon is decreasing.  Our balloon ascended to nearly 30km up.  At this altitude (3X the flying height of a transatlantic flight) we are above about 99% of the mass of the atmosphere!!
So here I have a few pictures and few graphs of data.

First the pictures.
The pictures are from Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh's GoPro Hero2 that was in the payload container. Please note that you may not use the pictures for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, without express written consent from Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh (you can email me and I can ask him for you). Luckily, I have received permission from Dr. Kavanaugh so that I can show these to you here. Note the blackness of space, the thin blue curve that represents the of the atmosphere and the cloudy skies with occasional peeks of the ground. In the 5th image down, you can see Miquelon Lake, which I studied for my Master's thesis.

 Some data:
Being a bit of a science geek, I thought it might be cool to show some of the data that was collected.  I won't be doing presenting any analysis here, just showing the measurements, but they are pretty cool. Here I am just going to show data from the balloon while it was rising.
First is the altitude.  This altitude is measured by the GPS unit. We found out later that it seems to have got the wrong altitude for the first 17 minutes of the flight, then suddenly the GPS altitude is corrected.  I am not sure what caused this, but the jump also appears in the Temperature and Pressure data and so it could be related to the power supply going to the microcontroller and to the various components. But you can see that the balloon rose to nearly 30km, again that is higher than about 99% of the mass of the  atmosphere and about 3 times higher than your transatlantic flights.

 Next we have the temperatures that were measured, the blue is measured outside of the box that held all the equipment, while the red is within the box and the green is measured on one of the circuit boards. It is pretty cool to see all of the structure in the air temperature measurements outside the box.  These are different layers within the atmosphere with different temperatures. The red curve is a little noisier than I was hoping for but shows that the inside of the box stays much warmer than outside (as expected, and not surprising).

 The next plot below is the air pressure with altitude.  Here you can see that air pressure decreases as we go up, and that the curve is pretty smooth but decreasing exponentially. As my air pressure sensor is only designed to work up to 8000m, or around 300millibar, I was quite happy to see that it worked the entire way up.  The lowest we measured was something like 9 or 10 millibar.

 Finally, this is just plot of the track the balloon took in UTM Northing and Easting coordinates. The red part of the track is the ascent, and the blue is the fall.  You can see that the GPS did not turn back on right away.  I'll have to work on this for any future launches.

I've also included a link to a Google Earth KMZ file.  If you have Google Earth on your computer you can just go to File, Open, and select this KML file (from where ever you downloaded it).   This will let you see the 3D track. Google Earth KML File.  If the page opens up a map view with nothing in it, there should still be a way to download the .KMZ file from that map view.

Well hopefully you found the pictures interesting.

In 6 days, I head to the Arctic for another round of CASIMBO (Canadian Arctic Sea Ice Mass Balance Observatory) measurements.  I will try to blog this year, but no promises, depends on how much work we do and how many hours I will have for sleep/blogging.