When lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag, anything can fly.

We recently had a chance to work with the fine folks at Intellectual Ventures to quantify some of what goes on with our coin shrinker. Using a bunch of neat gear (including an extremely high speed camera), we were able to learn all sorts of things about our amazing chamber of shrink. Here is some of what we learned:

• The coin shrinks in just 30 to 40 microseconds. Even when filming at 100,000 frames per second, that’s just 3 or 4 frames of video!
• By the time the coil begins to explode, the coin has already been shrunk for several microseconds!
• The collapsing coin gets extremely hot: the thinnest part of the center of a quarter glows bright white-red for a few microseconds just after shrinking.
• At one meter away from the spark gap, the shrinker generates a big bang: about 135 dB, or roughly as loud as a jet engine taking off from 100 meters away.
• The magnetic field created by the coil is extremely strong: at 10 cm from the coil (just on top of the lid of the blast chamber) we measured a peak field strength of 0.22 tesla, or about as strong as a small neodymium magnet.
• During the explosion, some of the bits of shrapnel fly past the camera’s view at about twice the speed of sound.
• The edge of the coin moves about 1/4″ in 36 microseconds, or roughly 400 miles per hour!

There’s a lot more info over on Intellectual Ventures’ blog. More photos of the camera rig and actual shrinkage are available here.

Two weeks ago we sent our buddy AHAB3 up into the air. About two hours into the flight and 56062 feet up, we stopped getting position updates. We could hear it transmitting, but it just kept repeating the same position.

Our recovery teams drove around and tried to use the secondary beacon to figure out where it was. We got some good headings using the direction-finding equipment, but then lost all signal from the payload.

We headed back to Seattle, sure we had lost a third payload.

Last Tuesday, 3ric got a call on his cell phone. A forest ranger in Idaho had stumbled across our bumblebee! He hiked it out, and a few days later shipped it off to us.

Monday morning we got a nice present at the lab, gingerly removed the SD card, and were greeted with:

Tonight the we’re going to go over the payload with a fine-toothed comb, and catalogue what’s broken and what’s still working. A number of systems malfunctioned during the flight, so it’s vital to know why if we want to do this again.

More photos can be found here

OMG BURGERS

I’m currently sitting in a small cafe in Cle Allum with the rest of the AHAB3 crew. It’s about 11:10 and we’re drinking milkshakes and eating burgers! For those of you who don’t know what we’re doing, this project is called AHAB3: Another High Altitude Balloon. Careful planning started months back, and the plan is finally underway. We’re launching this balloon to the edge of space so it can take pictures. We’re caravanning to Eastern Washington so we can launch the balloon at noon tomorrow. The flight will last around 2.5 hours, and we’re not sure how high it’ll go. All we can say is that it’ll go as high as possible till it bursts, and then a parachute will be deployed to guide it back down, hopefully safely. We’re tracking it via GPS so our chase vans can find it when it lands.

I got to the lab at about 5:00, and people slowly started to show up. Everyone arrived with bags, suitcases, ham equipment etc. We have a total of 4 cars in our caravan so all of our equipment was crowded together, but we ended up fitting it just fine. The caravan communicates via ham radio. We’re always in constant contact, sometimes we get a little crazy though. Sirus likes to provide tech support for his software using an Indian accent. Amy likes to be the Hackerbot mom and tell us bedtime stories.

We left lab around 9:00 and got to a small diner in Cle Allum at about 10. It’s nearly midnight now and I’m blogging from the car again! We should arrive at our lodge at around 2AM.

Regarding blogging from the car, I’m currently the only one with internets! I’m using a Sprint CDMA dongle and although it has an awkward name it’s quite fast. I’m using an Asus EeePC which is being charged by an inverter plugged into 3ric’s car. With internet access we’ve been able to look stuff up on the wiki, check email, and have access to all those other spiffy resources that we’d be otherwise without.

It seems like the Hackerbot crew is a malfunction magnet. First off Chicken’s MP3 player failed with a large pop and spark, and then some magical blue smoke. After that, we found that Adam’s laptop was giving off interference on the EXACT APRS frequency we are using to track each other. Adam disabled his sound card and now all seems to be okay. Other than that our stuff is working well… but I may have just jinxed us all.

I’m about to go to sleep, due to the fact that it’s 12AM and breakfast is at 8AM. My apologies if my post is sort of incoherent, I’m sleepy. Expect edits! Check back for more updates, and make sure to follow go_high on Twitter for balloon position updates starting tomorrow.

Here's Adam's interfering laptop.