My boys and I recently had the chance to launch a ping pong ball containing an Arduino Pro Mini with a temperature and humidity sensor to the edge of space. The experiment was wildly successful, and you can read about it on our site.
Just had a read - sounds like a pretty neat project. At least you're less likely to lose it if you send a load up together with some professionals tracking its location
Yes, from the JP Aerospace blog, it looks like they've tried RADAR in the past to track it. They also show a ~20 foot directional antenna, so they must be using something specific to track it.
The hardest part of this entire experiment was fitting the Arduino in a ping pong ball. Luckily, the Pro Mini is just small enough to work. If I could do it over again, I'd find a way to store more data than just what I can fit in the EEPROM.
Awesome project. I never would have thought you could get an arduino in a ping pong ball. But I've never seen the mini in person either.
For the humidity when I first saw the graph and before I read your theory I was actually thinking that the increased humidity might be from condensation forming on the ball as it was falling. But that's just a guess. I'm not meteorologist.
