NC Near Space Research started out as a group from TechShop RDU who entered the Hackerspaces in Space contest. We spent one month putting together a balloon to take pictures of the earth from near space. After launching the balloon, our tracking system promptly failed and it vanished. We quickly put together an attempt to salvage our day and assembled a complete backup system in 30 minutes! We launched it and after tracking it for several hours and then spending several more hours retrieving it from a tree, we opened up our camera to discover wonderful pictures! Since then, we have decided to continue launching balloons to near space to try out new and different things. This page will chronicle our activities. NSL-6 photos came out great! We only reached about 60 kft, but we got some great space photos and several of other aircraft, which is a first for us. Preliminary photos available on Flickr. They'll be added to the Maker Faire NC pool from there. More to follow... NSL-6 Balloon launched at 2:51pm, Saturday, June 18, 2011 from MakerFaire at the NC State Fairgrounds. With a 5 hour flight time, it reached a height of 60,827 ft and traveled 80 miles. Recovered at 7:40pm near Ayden, NC. (APRS Tracking data here.)  NSL-3 Balloon launched at 8:55am, Sunday, September 26 at 8:30am from Horseshoe Farm Park in Rolesville, NC. Payload was recovered at 12:40pm 5 miles north of Centerville just off Hyw 58. We are actively recruiting new team members! If you would like to join us, please click here. For group communication, please join our Google Group: NCNearSpace or join us in IRC on #ncnearspace on the Freenode IRC network. We recently had a meeting to plan our next launch. Here was the live streaming video from the meeting. |
Welcome! |