Thursday, December 4, 2008

And You May Ask Yourself...

...well, how did I get here?

The Telegraph published this photo of Teddies in Spaaaaaaccce! Cute, huh?
Turns out, there's a whole lot of interesting going on here. The "mission" was lofted on a weather balloon, with the purpose of making meterological observations at 100,000 feet altitude. A team of school students in the 12-13 age range designed and created the space suits to keep the bears from "freezing solid." Temperatures were monitored both inside and outside the space suits. According to the article this photo was snapped by an onboard computer; it's not clear to me how the data was received. The bears, I'm sure you'll be glad to learn, parachuted safely back to the ground, and were recovered 50 miles from the lauch site. So the data may have come back with the computer (though it's not clear whether the computer accompanied the bears back to Terra Firma), or it might have been radioed back to the ground.

No word on which one was in command, nor when the next mission is planned.

Followup: The Daily Mail has another article with quite few more pictures, and a clearer explanation of the whole procedure.

2 comments:

Dean Wormer said...

Don't let Stephen Colbert see that. He's terrified enough of a bear takeover without thinking they now employ higher technology.

Distributorcap said...

you mean there arent teddies in psace