Balloon Found!

We got called from a guy named Russ who said he found our 'science experiment' up near Streator Il. We drove up Saturday morning and got it off his porch where he left it for us. Naturally it was pouring down rain when we got it. We had to pur water out of the box! The parachute was missing but that makes sense since he said he had to pull it down from the tree - the lines tore through to box.

We immediatlly tried to watch the video, but even though there was a file on the SD card, it was unreadable. The temperature data appeared for the most part ok however.

It looks like the antenna surrived intact with no damage the buzz module has some corrision around in the power inputs which would imply that it got wet while powered. This would explain the loss of signal. The other electronics (beacon, temp monitoring) all have some small corrision, but I think they might be salvagable.

When I tried the video camera at home it briefly worked, but then the lcd quit. It still has visible water behind the lcd screen.

Attemps to restore the video eventually succedded! We don't have sound, but the video is good. It shows the balloon at first rising rapidly. But then it hits the low cloud cover and takes alot of rain. The lens fogs up and gets somewhat hard to see, but you can make out that it can never punch through the heavy rain/cloud cover. It slowly drifts down and west, it hits the ground right where we received the last gps position. The video then cuts out. The impact with the ground must have moved the water around and finally shorted out both the camera and the gps beacon. It must have then lost enough weight and combinded with the rain stopping, lifted off again and made it all the way to its burst altitude and fallen near Streator.

So after all of this we learned an important leasson: Don't launch in the rain!

It looks like the water is both what caused the balloon to not rise properly but also shorted out the electronics.

On the plus side we do have some temperature data: The lowest external reading was -53F on the external probe, the lowest inside the box was 20F. Also it kept recording until 4:30am the next morning!