Utahns 'balloon' into stratosphere

TAYLORSVILLE — As Utahns Mihir Godbole and Jonathan Adams crunched through the dry grass under a brilliantly blue November sky in a remote corner of Colorado, the anticipation in the air was so thick, neither one of them spoke.

A friend filmed the search for their pet science project, which had just fallen 108,000 feet from the sky. The video shook with each step toward their treasure, until suddenly Adams exclaimed, "I found it!"

There, in a vacant field near Sterling, Colo., was Pegasus II — a $5 lunchbox fitted with insulation and two cheap cameras bought off eBay. The odd package was special because a helium balloon had taken it up into Earth's stratosphere before falling back to the ground. Adams and Godbole figure they are the first to successfully launch such a project above 100,000 feet — and photograph the entire event — without any organizations or affiliations backing them up.

In fact, they're just a couple of software programmers who work at American Express in West Valley City who became unlikely friends over a common love of astronomy. One day in mid-September, 30-year-old Godbole — who is from Mumbai, India, and has been working for the last three years on assignment with American Express as a consultant — came to Adams' cubicle with an idea.

Both men had read an article about some MIT students who were working on a project that involved launching a helium balloon over 100,000 feet. It inspired them.

"(Mihir) was excited about the articles, and I was excited about it, and we got talking about it, and we thought, well, 'If those guys from MIT can do it, we can do it, too,' " said Adams, 47.

The two started working on their project — dubbed "Pegasus" — on nights and weekends. They researched helium balloons on the Internet and began brainstorming how to launch cameras above 100,000 feet, snap pictures of the Earth's surface the whole time and do it cheaply.

For each problem they faced, they found a solution — a process they painstakingly documented on their Web site, sites.google.com/site/viewearthfromspace. The team outfitted the cameras with warm socks from a sporting goods store and used hand warmers to keep them from freezing. They used some loose sheets of insulation found in Adams' basement to minimize heat loss. They stuffed trash bags inside the opaque-yellow helium balloon to act as a parachute. They learned from each other.