It’s Field Trip Friday today on Maker Camp and we’re going to take you on a trip to meet some high-flying makers. By high-flying I mean way up into the atmosphere and beyond!
We’ll hang out with Lauren Rojas and her dad Rod Rojas. Last year she created a YouTube sensation with her video of her Hello Kitty doll riding a weather ballon nearly 18 miles into the troposphere. A GoPro camera attached to a rocket-shaped gondola captured the incredible journey. Lauren was named one of the four top award winners at Antioch, California’s Cornerstone Christian School’s seventh-grade science fair and she will go on to compete at a regional science fair. The video of the trip logged nearly 900,000 views.
From one balloon we’ll talk about many as we check in with Google’s Project Loon. Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas to the internet, helping to fill coverage gaps, and bringing people back online after disasters.
Project Loon balloons float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. They are carried around the Earth by winds and they can be steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired direction. People connect to the balloon network using a special internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from balloon to balloon, then to the global internet back on Earth. A team of six people is required to launch a Loon balloon, including a launch commander and a coordination team at mission control.
How that for a high-flying day of Maker Camp?
Tune in right here on Google+ at 11am PDT, 1pm EST and be sure to float over to the Maker Camp community page on Google+.
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