Pictures of the Southampton Azure balloon
Source:
Southhampton University
The Segoz Logger in action
Here is a screenshot of the Segoz Windows Phone 7 App, showing live tracking information from the balloon. Steven Johnson, who built the app, says the phone is a good device for data capture compared to a dedicated data logger, as it contains a relatively powerful 1GHz processor and up to 32Gbytes of memory.
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.