Looking down upon our planet from the stratosphere - not the ride in Las Vegas but the from the second layer of the atmospehere, at 90000 ft above sea level.

Earth has a very special attribute which not many planets in this Milky Way possess - life supporting atmosphere. This layer of atmosphere is known to us as the troposphere which extends till about 8 km or 25000 ft above sea level. Beyond this limit is the 2nd layer of the atmosphere which we call Stratosphere.

As a kid and all through my life till date, space and what is out there has always fascinated me. I had read that our planet is blue and the ISS astronauts and other space farers have always mentioned about how the planet looks beautiful from the 3rd dimension. This is a sight which every man should get to see before he closes his eyes for good.

So be it, me and my friend - Jonathan decided to take a look at our planet from the highest possible altitude above Earth. Thus we started working on a project to launch cameras into the high and dark corners of the atmosphere and take snaps of our blue planet. We read about a group of MIT students who conducted a similar experiment and were successful in launching a camera into near-space and retrieve it back. We decided to try something of our own and which we did on 22 Nov 2009.

We launched a lunch box (originally designed to keep food warm), which formed our payload and included 2 Canon Digital cameras, GPS tracking devices (primary was a cell phone from BoostMobile and secondary was the SPOT GPS Personal Tracker) which provided us inputs on the payloads whereabouts and its final landing position. The payload also carried 2 data loggers - GPS and Pressure which helped us in knowing the minimum high altitude reached and calculate (linear estimation) the highest altitude scaled by the payload and the cameras. The fuel for this flight was an inflated helium balloon.

Ideation and out-of-the-box thinking were our drivers for success. We decided to use trash bags as a parachute and inserted the parachute into the latex balloon so that the balloon doesn't interfere with the parachute and increase its descend velocity. We used foam to attach to the sides of the lunch box to ensure that it has cushioning in order to protect anyone if this object hits and also to prevent the payload from drowning into any body of water in case it lands on it.

The balloon, after its launch near Fort Collins, CO soared high into the atmosphere and reached an altitude above 90000 ft before it burst and the payload returned back to Earth and landed safely in a field near Sterling, CO, about 65 miles from its launching site.

The project is a huge success and has confirmed many of the already proven facts such as atmospheric pressure is below 1000 Pa above 85000 ft, the sky starts to get black after 65000 ft, the density of air is 0.01% of the sea level at that altitude and we are going to launch another innovative flight again soon.

However the most important re-discovery was - "Our planet is really blue!"

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