When Team BAT arrived at the beach to examine the remains of their doomed weather balloon, they found the small padded lunch bag containing a SanDisk 1 gigabyte SD memory card completely soaked by salt water. Nearby lay the shattered remains of the digital camera. With no great hopes they searched through the rubble and were amazed to find the memory card, a SanDisk® 128 megabyte SD card, intact...

It all began last March when Team BAT (Balloon Atmospheric Telemetry), a group of engineering seniors from the University of California-Santa Cruz, launched the helium-filled balloon, laden with atmospheric probes, a transmitter, digital camera and custom-built data recorder, from a softball field in Watsonville, south of Santa Cruz.

The balloon was expected to rise to 60,000 feet and record and transmit information on a range of atmospheric conditions, aimed at helping astronomers adjust their telesopes to compensate for light distortion in the atmosphere.

Using a GPS device, the students tracked the balloon's position and flight path. Once the balloon reached its optimal height, a parachute was to open and bring it gently back to earth.

After 2 hours, disaster struck. A sudden shift in the wind pushed the balloon out over the ocean, where it ruptured and dropped into the waves a couple of miles offshore.

Memory Cards Recovered

The disappointed students wrote their mission off as a failure. They had received some information from the transmitter, but not enough to be really useful, and the digital camera and data reader were clearly lost in the depths of the ocean.

Until...five days later a beachcomber found the balloon's digital equipment washed up on the beach and called the university.

After visiting the scene of the wreck, the excited students raced back to the UC-Santa Cruz lab with the digital camera's memory card, where they dried it out and slipped it into a PC's card reader. They were rewarded with a string of breath-taking, high-altitude shots - the last image captured at 40,000 feet. Not a single picture was lost.

Unfortunately the SanDisk memory card from the data recording device fared less well.

It turned out to be completely unreadable.

As a last resort, the card was sent to SanDisk.

After a week of repeatedly scanning the memory card with a special reading device, SanDisk technician Ysabel Tran was able to salvage all the data, which she transferred to a new SD card and relayed back to Team BAT.

81,863 Feet

The data recovered from the memory flash card showed that the balloon had reached a maximum height of 81,863 feet, 21, 863 feet higher than expected.

And, whereas the radio transmitter had sent just 1,028 samples of data, the recovered memory flash card yielded a massive 53,406 samples.

The elated students were rewarded at graduation ceremonies in early June, when the university bestowed upon them the Dean's Award and the Chancellor's Award - a rare double honor.