| |
SD Memory Card Miraculously Survives 5 Days At Sea...
By Colin Healy
July 7 2005 - When Team BAT arrived at the beach to examine
the remains of their doomed weather balloon, they found the
small padded lunch bag containing a SanDisk 1 gigabyte SD
memory card completely soaked by salt water. Nearby lay the
shattered remains of the digital camera. With no great hopes they
searched through the rubble and were amazed to find the
memory card, a SanDisk? 128 megabyte SD card, intact...
It all began last March when Team BAT (Balloon
Atmospheric Telemetry), a group of engineering seniors
from the University of California-Santa Cruz, launched the
helium-filled balloon, laden with atmospheric probes, a
transmitter, digital camera and custom-built data
recorder, from a softball field in Watsonville, south of
Santa Cruz.
The balloon was expected to rise to 60,000 feet and
record and transmit information on a range of
atmospheric conditions, aimed at helping astronomers
adjust their telesopes to compensate for light distortion
in the atmosphere.
Using a GPS device, the students tracked the balloon's
position and flight path. Once the balloon reached its
optimal height, a parachute was to open and bring it
gently back to earth.
After 2 hours, disaster struck. A sudden shift in the wind
pushed the balloon out over the ocean, where it ruptured
and dropped into the waves a couple of miles offshore.
Memory Cards Recovered
The disappointed students wrote their mission off as a
failure. They had received some information from the
transmitter, but not enough to be really useful, and the
digital camera and data reader were clearly lost in the
depths of the ocean.
Until...five days later a beachcomber found the balloon's
digital equipment washed up on the beach and called the
university.
After visiting the scene of the wreck, the excited students
raced back to the UC-Santa Cruz lab with the digital
camera's memory card, where they dried it out and
slipped it into a PC's card reader. They were rewarded
with a string of breath-taking, high-altitude shots - the
last image captured at 40,000 feet. Not a single picture
was lost.
Unfortunately the SanDisk memory card from the data
recording device fared less well.
It turned out to be completely unreadable.
As a last resort, the card was sent to SanDisk.
After a week of repeatedly scanning the memory card
with a special reading device, SanDisk technician Ysabel
Tran was able to salvage all the data, which she
transferred to a new SD card and relayed back to Team
BAT.
81,863 Feet
The data recovered from the memory flash card showed
that the balloon had reached a maximum height of
81,863 feet, 21, 863 feet higher than expected.
And, whereas the radio transmitter had sent just 1,028
samples of data, the recovered memory flash card yielded
a massive 53,406 samples.
The elated students were rewarded at graduation
ceremonies in early June, when the university bestowed
upon them the Dean's Award and the Chancellor's Award
- a rare double honor.
About the Author
For late breaking news from the digital photography world and reviews of the best rated digital cameras visit http://www.review-of-digital-cameras.com
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/4784.html
| If you wish to add the above article to your website or newsletters then please include the "Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/4784.html" as shown above and make it hyperlinked. |
| |
|
