Modern Icarus took off with the right stuff

The MIT student, then a junior, soon became obsessed with making it happen.

He knew he would need help, but several friends were either too busy or just not interested. He asked Justin Lee, a first-year graduate student in mechanical engineering he had met in a fraternity. Lee quickly joined the quest.

“When you have an idea, people often say it’s been done before or it can’t be done,’’ Lee said. “Then it’s up to you to prove that it can be done, or that it can be done better.’’

Last month, the two young men proved it could be done. With low-tech equipment and a low budget, they launched a contraption 17.5 miles into the skies above Sturbridge, where it snapped photos of the earth’s curved edge against the black void of space.

A helium-filled weather balloon lifted the camera, enclosed in a Styrofoam cooler, into the stratosphere.

Five hours later, it parachuted into Worcester, with 4,000 photos from its journey.

The brilliance of the contraption was its simplicity and its cost: $150.

Besides the digital camera, weather balloon, and cooler, it consisted of a GPS-equipped cellphone, a plastic parachute, an antenna, duct tape, and instant hand warmers. In all, it weighed about two pounds - light enough not to be subject to Federal Aviation Administration rules for unmanned balloons.

“It’s remarkable,’’ said Daniel Tani, an astronaut at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus who stumbled upon news of the launch online. “What tickled me is that for $150 they were able to go to 93,000 feet.’’

Yeh is 20, studying computer science and electrical engineering in hopes of being “a hacker for the good guys.’’

Lee, 23, wants to build a microscope that can create three-dimensional images of cancer cells in real time.

“We just like to explore and understand stuff,’’ Yeh said one recent evening, sinking into Lee’s living room couch with a laptop on his knees.

Over the summer, the pair spent weeks coming up with a plan for the launch and testing their equipment. One challenge was to find a way to track the contraption that did not require spending $1,000 on a long-range radio. They settled on a simple Motorola cellphone equipped with GPS that would send its coordinates to a website when the device fell within range. For an extra boost, they attached the antenna from an old wireless router to the phone. Yeh walked around Boston with the phone to make sure it accurately tracked his movements.

Using open-source software, they hacked the camera so it would take photos every five seconds during the trip. They bought instant hand warmers, the kind people put in their gloves in the winter, and put them in a freezer overnight with the camera and phone. The batteries still worked the next morning, showing the hand warmers would keep the electronics from freezing in the subzero temperatures of the stratosphere.

To test the parachute, Yeh and Lee filled the cooler with eggs and dropped it off the roof of a five-story apartment building and made sure the eggs didn’t break.

The last task was to choose a location and a time for the launch. Using weather reports and a balloon trajectory forecasting website hosted by the University of Wyoming, Yeh and Lee looked for a day with clear skies and a spot far enough west so that the prevailing westerly winds would not sweep the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean.

The night before the launch, they drove west in a rental car, pulling off the road to sleep in a Target parking lot. The next day, Sept. 2, they stopped at the first open field that was far enough west, in Sturbridge, unloaded their contraption, filled it with helium, and released it.

They squinted in the midday sun as they watched the balloon carry the cooler into the sky. They had forgotten to buy binoculars, so they couldn’t see it for long.

About five hours later, the cellphone had transmitted its location, in Worcester, about 20 miles away. Soon afterward, the students were looking at photos of the earth from near-space. Simple calculations showed the contraption had taken four hours to rise to 93,000 feet, and 40 minutes to fall back to the ground.

Since the launch, almost 1 million people have visited the website (space.1337arts.com) of Project Icarus - which Yeh and Lee named after the Greek mythological figure who flew too close to the sun - to look at photos and a time-lapse video of the flight. They have received hundreds of e-mails from around the world, donations to cover their Web-hosting fee, and offers of unusual gifts - including handmade T-shirts and stuffed animals from China.

But one thing they have not gotten is much admiration from their classmates.

“MIT students go so deep down that for them, this is boring,’’ Yeh said. “They would have been more interested if we had hacked more or if we had to take 10 minutes to explain it.’’

That does not bother Lee, who says he likes that the experiment is accessible to anyone. “Even my 13-year-old brother could do this,’’ he said.

They plan to post free instructions for building the contraption on their website.

Yeh, starry-eyed, said he now dreams of launching a camera into space with a rocket.

Bina Venkataraman can be reached at bina@globe.com.