First off, I’d like to suggest a great blog to check out

http://bit.ly/SpaceProbes

If you are into technology and innovation, it will be a very fruitful read.

Why am I recommending the blog, well…

About a year or so ago, I was fortunate enough to meet a portuguese chap at a Hackathon in London. Now, these is back when Portugal was suffering from some very serious forest fires. This gentleman had an idea, which was to create a drone ‘swarm’ which would intelligently map the spread and progress of the fire, as well as locate anyone that looked to be in danger.

As it happens within a few hours he had a working prototype that used basic swarm ai. With that, he planned to approach the portuguese government with his innovation. Very much impressed with this ethos, and encouraged by the availability and consumability of current technology to allow this democratised innovation, I started to think of ideas that sounded fun. And that with currently available, inexpensive technology would allow anyone to achieve awesome things.

First idea – send a probe to the edge of space, transmit back data on the conditions the probe encounters and then represent (rather than replicate) the conditions on the ground both physically and virtually.

I contacted Imperial College in London, to see if anyone was up for the challenge, and was fortunate enough to find that seven engineering students were up for it.

The team is now well under way, and they are documenting their progress. Find out more here…

http://bit.ly/SpaceProbes