Sunday, April 06, 2008

Spirit Of Knoxville: Autonomous Trans-Atlantic Balloon Project


University of Tennessee students have built 5 balloons that they release into the jet stream, and track via radio and gps. The goal? To get to Europe. They have released 4 balloons so far, and the launch is tonight! April 06, 2007 (00:00 GMT/20:00EDT) is the scheduled lift-off. They need help tracking it, and have links and software to send your results back (almost like an earth bound seti). Hmmm, They have on the website, they say 8:00pm EST, aren't we on EDT? Oh well... check the Launch page to findout. The last flight lasted 40 hours and ended up in Ireland. They also have live updates, once it has launched.

Spirit Of Knoxville: Autonomous Trans-Atlantic Balloon Project
update: The Latest News:
* Recovery plans underway. Volunteers heading to area. 42 minutes ago
* Balloon has landed in southwestern Virginia. The balloon plastic seems to have failed during the initial climb. more details may be posted about 3 hours ago
* Landing will occur within the next few hours in the US. The balloon envelope has failed, no reason has been hypothesis about 14 hours ago
[h/t GeekDad blog @ wired]

--MissM
P.S. Because I have ADD, I'm unable to limit this to one topic. :P If you just read this through RSS, you might want to click through to the site, to check out the links I share in my google reader, have our posts read to you and search amazon, plus any other things I'm experimenting with (mwahahaha). Please let me know if you have suggestions or comments here or by email missm.oncomputers at gmail.com . As always, thanks for reading and contributing SO much to our weblog!
Jane

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