Overview

A fun little project. We strapped a Nexus 5 smartphone onto a weather balloon and launched it as high as we could, gathering lots of data and photographs from the Nexus along the way.

Here’s how it went:

• 27.96 km (91,732 feet, 17.37 miles) max altitude. That puts us above the troposphere (where clouds hang out) and into the stratosphere.
• -62.2 ºC (-79.96 ºF) temperature at minimum. It gets cold up there.
• 10:25 AM to 12:19 PM (1 hour, 6 minutes) liftoff to landing. We filled the balloon with a lot of helium so that it would ascend as quickly as possible.

What else was on the weather balloon? A few GoPro cameras, a flight computer, and a GPS tracker.

The Space Hardware Club (http://space.uah.edu/) at our university does this sort of thing all the time–at the undergraduate level.

This is what makes STEM so cool. If you’re into science or engineering, this is the sort of stuff that you can do.

Pictures

Data