Lost at sea, found in flash

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the telemetry equipment and a SanDisk 1GB standard SD memory card had been thoroughly soaked by saltwater. Nearby were the shattered remains of the Aiptek PenCam SD digital camera, which had been separated from the bag. The camera's memory card, a SanDisk 128MB standard SD card that generally sells for about $20, was among the rubble.

Recovered memories
Back at UC Santa Cruz, students dried out the camera card using alcohol, slipped it into a PC card reader and saw a string of high-elevation photos, some taken at heights of up to 79,000 feet. The images showed various representations of the craggy coast, wave crests, rip currents and even the Watsonville, Calif., airport. The camera had snapped pictures every 10 seconds, Vesecky said, and not a single image was lost.

The data recovery "was very exciting," said Dave van Unen, a member of the engineering lab staff at UC Santa Cruz. "They thought the balloon was completely lost."

But the main SanDisk SD card from the data recording device--which tracked crucial information on temperature, pressure and the like every tenth of a second--was totally unreadable. As a last resort, the engineering lab sent the 1GB card (which usually costs between $75 and $100) to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based SanDisk.

After a week of repeatedly scanning the card with a special reading device and getting intermittent errors, a technician in SanDisk's engineering lab was able to extract all of the data on the card. She transferred it to another SD card, which was immediately sent to Team BAT.

While SanDisk has in the past produced industrial memory cards for use in aerospace projects and heavy industrial equipment, the SanDisk cards used by the Santa Cruz students were the consumer electronics kind one picks up at retailers such as Best Buy or Circuit City.

Other companies that have benefited from the popularity of cards include Lexar and Samsung, although chronic gluts--like one going on now--often mean that the good times quickly lead to price declines.

Roberto Menchaca, a member of the UCSC engineering team, said that although his group estimated a peak altitude of 60,000 feet for the balloon, the card data recovered by SanDisk showed a maximum of 81,863 feet--far higher than the original objective. And while the balloon transmitter radioed just 1,028 samples of data, the card yielded a whopping 53,406 samples. "This gave us more accurate data," Menchaca said, "and just as important, it was continuous, whereas the data we received by radio was full of gaps."

The student project was supported by astronomers from the Palomar and Lick observatories in California and funded by Cal Space, a state grant program that promotes space-related education within the university system, and the Center for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz.

By using the student balloon data, land-based astronomers can begin to profile the layers of turbulence and compensate for them, a process called "adaptive optics," Vesecky said. Another student balloon, named the HASTE project, was launched in June, and a third may be released this fall, he added.

Elated at the surprise success of their project, the students presented their report to their research sponsors. At graduation ceremonies in early June, the university gave them both the Dean's Award and the Chancellor's Award--a rare double honor.

"The five of us really were committed and excited about the project," Vendt-Pearce said. "The fact that it worked out is even better."

CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.

[katamari]

Moving parts need to go.

Consider this news post incredibly informative, if not for the stories and truths, for the simple fact that moving parts are the cause of most failures in electronic-related equipment these days. That means you, hard disk manufacturers...

We really need to go back to the days of solid state electronics. I'm glad to see companies like SanDisk and some others relying on high-speed reliable engineering and technology for storage of data. We need more of this.

Of course, what SD doesn't tell you up front is the fact that storage devices such as memory cards/sticks have a very limited write cycle count -- meaning, they can only handle X number of writes before experiencing data loss or downright failure. The "X" is not an unreasonable or absurd number -- it's in the ballpark of "oh gee, after a few years of using this thing ever day, it's dead". You can only imagine what would happen if SD-like products were used as hard disks...

Hopefully SD will make something like low-voltage battery-backed SDRAM, which is high speed, has a long-lasting lifetime, and sports a quite small form factor.

Either way, for now, getting rid of moving parts is the way to go.

[kieranmullen]

Microdrives

Hold your horses Microdrives will be here for awhile longer. You can get 3 times the space for the same cost. Hitachi http://www.hgst.com is now sporting 10 GB drives. They are pretty tough little drives (I own one) They are helping to drive down the prices on flash memomory.

Kieran Mullen
Portland OR