Ever wanted to see what would happen to an object if it was to be subjected to the harsh extremes of space but didn’t have the means to do it? Well thanks to some crowdfunding, JP Aerospace will fly science projects of over 1000 students to space and back…as long as the project can fit inside of a ping pong ball.
The program, called PongSat, has been active since 2002, and 6,440 students have used the program for their experiments since its start. The ping pong balls, used for their convenient and uniform size, are loaded onto a weather balloon and rise to a height of over 100,000 feet, where they are subjected to “near-vacuums, cosmic rays, zero gravity, and temperatures 90 degrees below zero”, according to Wired.com. All this isn’t the cheapest endeavor, so JP Aerospace turned to the idea funding website Kickstarter to raise money to support Pongstat.
While you may not be a student, the good news is that you can get in on the action. Since PongSat reached their funding goal, any contributions at this point are guaranteed to be collected and any rewards will be sent out. That means for $10 you can send your business card to space and back (maybe drum up some new interstellar clients) or for $3500 you can send a sign up to space and get a DVD of the whole trip, among other rewards for donations.
We’re happy to let you donate in our name and send a giant TTN logo up there (just because table tennis is the most played sport on earth, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the most played sport in the universe…yet).
This might be the most amazing science project ever, and the fact that it’s all in a ping pong ball makes it even better.
Via Wired and Kickstarter (thanks Russell for the tip)
