Engineers at SanDisk Corporation were able to salvaged valuable data from a high-flying atmospheric research balloon that plunged into the Pacific Ocean after it was launched by a team of university students off the central California coast. The balloon was part of research into adaptive optics. As a result of the SanDisk effort, astronomical observatories that benefit from the project now have information that will help them focus more clearly on objects in outer space and the students have been awarded special honors for their effort.
This remarkable chain of events began when the students, all engineering seniors at the University of California-Santa Cruz, released a helium-filled balloon with instruments that included atmosphere probes, a transmitter, a digital camera and a custom-built data recorder. Both the camera and the recorder used SanDisk SD flash memory cards to capture images and continuous telemetry readings.
The balloon was tracked for two hours after launch and then it disappeared. It was thought the balloon would never be seen again but five days later it was found washed up on a beach. Although the digital camera was shattered, the memory cards were recovered. Back at the UC-Santa Cruz lab, the excited students dried out the card from the camera, slipped it into a card reader on a PC, and observed a string of breathtaking, high-elevation photos, the last one shot at 40,000 feet. Not a single image was lost.
But the SanDisk SD card from the data recording device was completely unreadable. The card was sent to SanDisk as a last resort and after a week of intermittent effort, all the data was recovered. This enabled the students to finish their project. At graduation ceremonies held in early June, the university gave them both the Dean’s Award and the Chancellor’s Award — a rare double honor. These events once again demonstrates the hardiness of flash memory storage cards.