Press Release: SANDISK RESCUES VALUABLE DATA FROM HIGH-ALTITUDE WEATHER
BALLOON THAT CRASHES INTO THE PACIFIC OCEAN
Engineers at SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ:
SNDK) have salvaged valuable data from a high-flying atmospheric research
balloon that plunged into the Pacific Ocean after it was launched by a team of
university students off the central California coast. As a result, astronomical
observatories that benefit from the project now have information that will help
them focus more clearly on objects in outer space, and the students have been
awarded special honors for their effort.
This remarkable chain of events began
when the students, all engineering seniors at the University of California-Santa
Cruz, released a helium-filled balloon with instruments that included atmosphere
probes, a transmitter, a digital camera and a custom-built data recorder. Both
the camera and the recorder used SanDisk
SD™
flash memory cards to capture
images and continuous telemetry
readings.
Calling themselves Team BAT
(for Balloon Atmospheric Telemetry), the students launched their balloon in
early March from a softball field in Watsonville, a coastal agricultural
community south of Santa Cruz. Their intent was for it to rise 75,000 feet and
continually record information on turbulence including wind velocity,
temperature, humidity, pressure, altitude, longitude and latitude. These are
parameters that help astronomers to measure light distortion in the atmosphere
and adjust their telescopes for the clearest
image.
With a GPS device giving the
balloon’s position, the students were able to track its flight path for
about two hours. They were expecting it to reach maximum elevation before
deploying a parachute and settling gently back to earth. But things suddenly
went haywire. A sudden shift in the wind pushed the balloon and its payload of
electronics over the ocean, where it ultimately ruptured and splashed into the
waves about two miles offshore from Pajaro Dunes, presumably never to be seen
again. Team BAT was ready to scratch the mission as a failure after gleaning
only erratic bits of data from the
transmitter.
But fortune prevailed. Five days after
the balloon disappeared, a beachgoer found the apparatus washed ashore about 20
miles north of where it had dropped into the ocean, and called the university.
When the students arrived, they saw that the small padded lunch bag containing
the circuit board for the telemetry equipment – and a SanDisk 1-gigabyte
(GB) standard SD memory card – were thoroughly soaked by saltwater.
Nearby were the shattered remains of the digital camera, which had been
separated from the bag. Amazingly, the memory card, a SanDisk 128-megabyte (MB)
standard SD card, was among the rubble.
Back at the
UC-Santa Cruz lab, the excited students dried out the card from the camera,
slipped it into a card reader on a PC, and observed a string of breathtaking,
high-elevation photos, the last one shot at 40,000 feet. Not a single image was
lost. But the SanDisk SD card from the data recording device was completely
unreadable. So Dave Van Unen, engineering lab staff for the university’s
Jack Baskin School of Engineering, sent the card to SanDisk as a last
resort.
After a week of repeatedly scanning
the card with a special reading device and getting intermittent errors, Ysabel
Tran, a technician in SanDisk’s engineering lab, was finally able to
extract all of the data on the card. She transferred it to another SD card,
which was immediately relayed to Team
BAT.
UCSC engineering student Roberto
Menchaca said that although his group estimated a peak altitude of 60,000 feet
for the balloon, in fact the card data recovered by SanDisk showed a maximum of
81,863 feet -- far above the original objective. And while the balloon
transmitter radioed just 1,028 samples of data, the card yielded a whopping
53,406 samples. “This gave us more accurate data and, just as important,
it was continuous, whereas the data we received by radio was full of
gaps,” he said.
Elated at their now successful
project, the students presented their report to their research sponsors. And
when graduation ceremonies were held in early June, the university gave them
both the Dean’s Award and the Chancellor’s Award – a rare
double honor. Members of the team, apart from Menchaca, consisted of project
leader Skye Vendt-Pearce, Bartolo Alvarado, Amanuel Mengistu and Kathy
Phan.
“We’re delighted that we
were able to assist these aspiring engineers and thus contribute to the space
program,” said Nelson Chan, SanDisk’s executive vice president and
general manager for consumer and handset business. “This amazing series
of events once again demonstrates the durability of SanDisk’s flash memory
cards.”
Dr. John Vesecky, professor of
electrical engineering at UC-Santa Cruz and the faculty “mentor” of
the student team (along with Prof. Don Wiberg, Cyrus Bazeghi and Stephen
Petersen), said the overall project was supported by astronomers from the
Palomar and Lick observatories in California and funded by Cal Space, a state
grant program that promotes space-related education within the university
system, and the Center for Adaptive Optics at UC-Santa
Cruz.
“The students were measuring
variations in atmospheric turbulence as indicated by wind shear and temperature
changes,” said Vesecky. “These are little fluctuations in air
temperature that occur in sizes of from 10 centimeters to a few hundred meters.
They are like eddies in the atmosphere and they create distortion – the
‘twinkling’ in the stars that people see from earth – and
generate fuzzy images for space telescopes. It’s like looking at lights
through a swimming
pool.”
By using the student balloon data,
land-based astronomers can begin to profile the layers of turbulence and
compensate for them, he added. This process is called “adaptive
optics,” and the UC-Santa Cruz program in this field is nationally
recognized. Another student balloon called the HASTE project was launched in
June and a third may be released this fall, said
Vesecky.
SanDisk is the
original inventor of flash storage cards and is the world’s largest
supplier of flash data storage card products, using its patented, high-density
flash memory and controller technology. SanDisk is headquartered in Sunnyvale,
CA and has operations worldwide, with more than half of its sales outside the
U.S.
Posted: Thu - July 7, 2005 at 02:14 PM