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By Harriette Halepis

Source acquired via Tonic, March 26, 2010 – Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of imagination, a Canon digital camera, and a GPS tracker to amaze the world, though amazement isn’t what Robert Harrison was attempting to achieve when he sent his camera into space.

GPS Tracking from Space

Harrison simply thought that it would be interesting to take aerial shots of his house in Yorkshire, England, so he strapped his Canon camera to a remote control helicopter, and sent it into the atmosphere. When the helicopter landed, Harrison was thrilled at the results – clear photographs of his backyard.

That’s when the idea to explore space entered his mind. Using a hot air balloon and the same camera, Harrison attached a GPS tracker to the balloon, and sent the entire thing into space (inside of a secure polystyrene box). After using his GPS tracking device to locate the balloon once it fell to the Earth, Harrison found that his camera took stunning photos of “…the Earth’s atmosphere, the thin blue thing in which we live and breathe and of course the blackness of space…”

Not only has Harrison managed to capture the attention of the entire world, he’s also managed to capture the attention of NASA. The space agency was seemingly baffled at the idea of taking photographs of space on such a small budget (Harrison’s space missions only cost him around $750 as compared to NASA’s million-dollar missions).

Harrison hopes that his experiment will inspire high school science teachers to consider adding the experiment to existing curriculums. In his own words, Harrison believes that “if I had done this at school, I would have remembered it forever and it’s well within the budgets of schools.”

While there’s no word whether or not schools will be following Harrison’s lead quite yet, the likelihood that school science classes around the globe will be purchasing a large number of digital cameras, hot air balloons, and GPS trackers is great.