Peeps in space
This weekend is proving to be one of the more bizarre I’ve had for a while. I’m writing this from a barn on a pumpkin farm about two hours’ drive south of Chicago. I’m here for the Chicago Astronomical Society’s Astrofest and I’ll be talking later about Galaxy Zoo (of course).
I can’t resist sharing this video with you, though. The Adler Planetarium run a high altitude balloon programme using students and interns (and a weather balloon six-foot across) to launch instruments more than twice as high as your average Boeing 767 reaches. For reasons best known to themselves, one of these flights carried a marshmallow bird called a peep along with it.
You can watch the flight of the Peep below :


on September 6th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
There are amateur balloon stratospheric flights also in your country, i.e. HAPS-1 and HAPS-D by Doug Ellison and other members of the Unmanned Spaceflight.com online forum. Check these threads from the end for some cool photos and videos (with audio): http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=5369 and http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=5427
on September 6th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
didnt expect to see such a good peep show on this blog. keep em coming!
i’ll be in oxford the weekend of the 20th. will you be around?
on September 9th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
44 seconds in I must stop watching before I throw up!
Peep-le do strange things!
on September 10th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Well it beats what I did today!
on September 11th, 2008 at 12:15 am
What I want to know, is did Peep survive re-entry?