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Toronto high school students send Lego man on space adventure
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By Tori Floyd | Daily Brew –
Two teens from Toronto have sent a Lego man where no little plastic man has gone before.
In a project they embarked on just for fun, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad decided they would send a Lego man into space, just to see if they could. According to the Toronto Star, the pair rigged up four cameras and their plastic astronaut to a homemade weather balloon. Their experiment returned to Earth after 97 minutes, bringing with it some incredible footage, especially considering that they built everything with only $400.
The two students at Agincourt Collegiate Institute calculate that their contraption managed to reach 24 kilometres above the Earth, which is about three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest. Ho and Muhammad say that the Lego man climbed to about 80,000 feet before the weather balloon popped and began its descent. It landed about 122 kilometres from where they had launched it, and was tracked down by the pair.
"We kind of started jumping, because there was no one around, so you could do that," Muhammad said in the Star story. The cameras had captured 1,500 photos of the journey, snapping a picture every 20 seconds, which the boys turned into their video.
Since the Star first published the story Tuesday morning, the boys have become the focus of much media attention and positive feedback from the science community.
"It shows a tremendous degree of resourcefulness," said Dr. Michael Reid, an astrophysics professor at the University of Toronto, in the Star story.
So what is the next big project that the boys have in mind? Graduating, said Ho.
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