Teens Capture Amazing Shots 20 Miles from Earth's Surface With a Balloon

Clever kids.

Great story, great job by the future scientists of the world.

It's good to hear about fellows like this instead of the repeated "bad" sstories by the press about drive-by shootings, drugs, and sex.

Great story, more power to them.

I'm hoping NOT to hear that the authorities are investigating them for Homeland Security infractions and violating national airspace rules!!!

Hooker <--- natural libertarian cynic in a federal nanny environment

Well, since this all took place in Spain, they are probably safe from US Homeland Security. Although, according to their account, they did have a small run-in with the Guardia Civil. Everything worked out though.More pics and the full story on their web page:

http://translate.google.com/translate?client=tmpg&hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fteslabs.com%2Fmeteotek08%2F&langpair=ca|en

And I would like to add my congratulations to everyone else's.

That's pretty amazing that a balloon went up 20 miles and back and landed only 6 miles from the launch point. I would have figured that it had traveled much, much farther. The winds must have been extremely calm for that entire amount of vertical travel.

There's a couple of interesting 2D and 3D graphics of the flight path in the link bp01 posted.

Looks like the lower winds were trending NW but higher winds were trending east so the distance over ground was much lower than it might have been.

Maybe that part of Spain doesn't have a jet stream??

Hooker

I don't know when they did their baloon flight, but I found these images of the jet stream in Europe informative: