US students sent camera into near-space

A group of US science students have upstaged NASA by sending a camera into near-space to take pictures of Earth using off-the-shelf items costing just $US150 ($170).

Displaying stunning ingenuity reminiscent of MacGyver, the MIT students filled a weather balloon with helium and strapped it to a styrofoam beer cooler containing a cheap Canon A470 camera that was programmed to take photos every five seconds.

The students - Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee and Eric Newton - placed hand warmers inside the beer cooler to ensure the camera and battery did not freeze in the -40-degree temperatures.

The balloon popped after about four hours once it was about 28 kilometres high, causing it to spiral back to the ground. The drop was relatively smooth and took about 40 minutes thanks to a parachute attached to the cooler.

But a prepaid Motorola mobile phone equipped with GPS technology, which was placed inside the cooler, allowed the students to keep track of the rig's location and retrieve it once it landed - about 32 kilometres from the launch site.

Using a "balloon trajectory forecast" tool on the University of Wyoming's website, the group were able to estimate with a high degree of accuracy where the cooler would land.

"We were like placing bets on whether we thought it would work or not," Lee, 23, told CNN.

"Early on, we were optimistic that it would work. About four hours after, [when] we hadn't heard any news about the device, we had sort of given up hope. We'd thought we'd lost it."

The group has published amazing photos and a YouTube video using images taken off the camera. It plans to publish step-by-step instructions, teaching other people how to make a space camera.

"We tested our parachute by putting eggs inside our styrofoam box and tossing the box off of a five-storey building," the students wrote on their website.

"We were not satisfied with the landing speed of our box until the eggs did not break upon the box's impact."

"We tested our parachute by putting eggs inside our styrofoam box and tossing the box off of a five-storey building," the students wrote on their website.

"We were not satisfied with the landing speed of our box until the eggs did not break upon the box's impact."

The group were quick to point out that their rig did not involve elaborate equipment and complicated hardware hacking, aside from loading the camera with open-source software enabling it to take pictures continuously.

Since unveiling the project, the students have learnt they could have bought the phone for $US20 less and a memory card that was $US10 cheaper. It's conceivable that the project could be completed for under $US100, which pales in comparison with the billions of dollars NASA spends on its space projects.

Others have sent balloons into space to take pictures but none have managed to make the process nearly as cheap and simple as the MIT project.

The students have been inundated with feedback after their photographs spread virally online, leading them to put this disclaimer on their website: "CAUTION/DISCLAIMER: Launching things into the stratosphere can be DANGEROUS! Please contact the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] before trying any launches."