Up, up and away

Weather balloon camera found two years after launch

By California State University, Bakersfield

August 30^th, 2021

“What goes up must come down” is accurate but perhaps a little oversimplified. When Dr. Saeed Jafarzadeh, associate professor of computer and electrical engineering, launched a GoPro camera attached to a weather balloon for a project with high school students in 2019, finding where it landed to recover the footage proved to be the hardest part.

Two years later, the camera was found not far from where the California State University, Bakersfield professor had initially looked, in a remote area east of Bakersfield, several miles north of where highways 58 and 223 meet. Wildlife biologist Edwin Jacobo was working in the area monitoring birds for a conservation project with Southern Sierra Research Station when he found the camera and quickly realized it was not a piece of his team’s equipment.

“I was walking in that area because that was part of the transect I needed to cover, and I saw this little (Styrofoam) cooler in the hillside,” Jacobo said. “I was a little tired because it was nearly noon, and I was all, ‘Should I go and see what that is? It’s probably trash somebody just left there.’ It was uphill, it was probably 150 meters away and it was hot.”

A PhD student at Washington State University who has worked with Southern Sierra in the summer for five years, Jacobo decided to see what it was and found a camera in the cooler. After seeing it wasn’t a wildlife camera trap, he investigated to find out what the camera was and why it was there. Though the camera fell apart in his hands, worse the wear from two years of exposure to the elements, the SD card was fine. From the photos, maps and some Googling, he traced it back to CSUB.

“I’m a scientist, so I understand that when you put a lot of effort into collecting data, you’re putting in money and time too, so even if it has been several years after, it’s still important to get your results,” Jacobo said. “I would expect if somebody found a camera trap or a device that I lost that they would return it, not because I want the device but because I want to know what happened, if I collected any data.”

“We got very lucky about who found it,” Dr. Jafarzadeh said. “He told me when he saw it, right away, he knew it was not a monitoring system someone put there. He knew someone was not going to come after this. Luckily, right away he understood there was something there. He took the SD card, and his phone could read it, so he went through the videos and saw the footage.”

Recovering the camera’s footage is a happy, if belated, resolution to a project Dr. Jafarzadeh had long regarded as a failure.

After many years leading the same projects for CSUB’s former Revs Up, a research program for high school students, Dr. Jafarzadeh wanted to try something new in 2019. He had heard about people launching a GoPro camera high into the air with a weather balloon and thought it would be a fun project for the students and a change of pace for himself.

“It was exciting and so radically different than whatever I had done before,” Dr. Jafarzadeh said. “I started Googling it, I read about it, I saw some videos. It felt like it was doable. It was unusual in terms of supplies and preparation, and I had not done it before, so sometimes I wasn’t sure if what we were doing was the right thing.”

Filled with helium, the weather balloon ascended some 90,000 to 100,000 feet, with the camera capturing footage along the way. A GPS device allowed Dr. Jafarzadeh and the students to track the camera’s location until a certain height when it would lose signal. They knew the difference in pressure had caused the balloon to pop and the camera to start its parachute descent when the GPS started sending a signal again, meaning it was close to the ground.

Everything had seemingly gone to plan but the camera’s GPS stopped sending the constant signals it was supposed to as it descended, sending a few sporadic final signals before going black. When Dr. Jafarzadeh went to find the camera where the GPS had indicated it was landing, it was nowhere to be found.

“When we went out there twice and couldn’t find it, I felt like maybe it was miles away and I dragged people to search for this box that is just not there, but now that we got the coordinates, we were actually very close,” he said. “It’s possible it was in our eye line and we just didn’t pay enough attention or weren’t prepared enough for a search.”

At the time, Dr. Jafarzadeh was sad about being unable to recover the camera’s footage, feeling like he had let the group of high school students down.

“I wanted them to see the footage and be excited,” he said. “They worked very hard. I sort of felt like I failed them, so it was a very sad project. When that program was finished, I was really sad, it really hit me, because of those students. I felt very bad. And that’s why after the program finished, we went out again, some colleagues and I, to see if we could find it, because what really mattered to me was those students.”

Hearing from Jacobo, who reached out to CSUB’s School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering through Twitter, finally gave the project the ending it deserved. Dr. Jafarzadeh was surprised to hear someone had found it, as the project hadn’t been on his mind for a long time. He reached out to the students from the original project to share the news.

“Having this kind of feedback for collecting your own data is great, and now these kids, it’s been a couple years, but being able to see what they achieved by putting this together, I think it’s great,” Jacobo said. “They had to wait a little bit, but I hope they get as excited as I got seeing the videos. Even if I was not part of the design, now it’s like I’m part of the story.”

After two years outside and exposed to the elements, the camera had certainly seen better days when Dr. Jafarzadeh went to pick it up, but the footage it contained was far more important. Finally, he could share with the students the results from the project.

“This kind of gave me closure,” he said. “The lesson is that it is worth it to try new things. There were so many challenges, but with this closure, it was fun. It was worth it, 100 percent.”