Pictures of the Southampton Azure balloon
Source:
Southampton University
Preparing for launch
The payload that can be launched by the helium balloon needs to be quite light. The experiment aims to demonstrate how a balloon can be accurately tracked in-flight, in order to aid recovery of the instruments.
Southampton University has successfully recovered instrumentation launched into the stratosphere using a high altitude balloon. An HTC smartphone running a Windows Phone 7 app was used to monitor and update tracking information for the balloon via the Microsoft Azure cloud as it ascended to over 60,000 feet. The
experiment paves the way to using relatively low cost helium balloons as launch vehicles for instruments that are able to take measurements and samples from the upper atmosphere.