London:
While NASA might spend millions to take snaps of the Earth, a teenager in the UK has captured stunning images of the planet by floating a second-hand camera worth 30 pounds into space using a balloon.
The photos look like they could be the latest images taken from a multi-million pound NASA satellite but Adam Cudworth managed to capture incredible views of the earth from space using little more than a balloon and his second-hand camera.
Cudworth, 19, whose scientific background consists of only a Physics A-Level, achieved his incredible feat, on a 200 pounds budget, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The student spent 40 hours working on a home-made device consisting of a box containing a GPS, radio and microprocessor, which soared to an incredible height of 110,210 ft (33,592 metres) when he released it last Thursday.
After taking two-and-a-half hours to float over 20 miles up into the earth's stratosphere, his contraption captured out-of-this-world images giving breathtaking views of our planet from space.
Cudworth used a GPS tracker similar to a car's sat-nav to follow its progress and an attached radio transmitter to find it when it fell back to earth having reached speeds of over 150mph.
The teenager, from Ombersley, Worcestershire, said: "It's just a bit of hobby really, I just wanted to set myself a challenge, but I'm amazed at the results".
"I saw a guy who did a similar thing a couple of years back and I just wanted to recreate it, but better. I have no background in astrophysics or anything like that, I'm just an engineering student," he said.
"People think it's something that costs millions of pounds but I've proved you can do it on just a 200 pounds budget," he added.
Cudworth placed the second-hand camera he had bought in an insulated box along with a small video camera, two temperature sensors, two high-performance solar panels, a tracking device, microprocessor and radio.
The Nottingham University student then attached it to a high-altitude two metre latex balloon with a parachute and named his contraption HABE 5.
Following the launch, Adam tracked the balloon as it climbed to three times the height of a commercial plane before it burst and landed in Broadway, Worcestershire, 30 miles from his home.
He retrieved the camera which had recorded stunning snaps of the Earth from space and video footage of the assembled machine swirling through the clouds to dizzying heights. PTI ASK AKJ