We’ve seen photos taken from camera-totting balloons of the edge of space using relatively cheap, off-the-shelf hardware. Now, students have captured video and stills of the shuttle Discovery on its final trip to space. The joint effort between the Challenger Center for Space Science Education and Quest for Stars allows middle-school and high-school students to send balloon-borne experiments to the edge of space. Quest for Stars equipped a helium-filled Robonaut-1 balloon with a payload consisting of multiple cameras, an onboard computer system, mobile phones and a Global Positioning System (GPS) device. The balloon usually rises to a height of 70,000 feet before it pops and descends back to Earth. The students then use the GPS signal to track and recover the balloon and its payload.
Read the article and view the video and pictures at: Space.com