Skyfall: Signal Fusion from a Smartphone Falling from the Stratosphere

Skyfall is a high-quality dataset that showcases the RedVox SDK and the RedPandas library for processing smartphone data collected with the RedVox Infrasound Recorder app.

What is Skyfall?

In essence, Skyfall is an event where a smartphone fell from a high altitude and landed on the ground. A balloon hoisted a commercial, off-the-shelf, smartphone to a height of 36 km (around 119,000 feet) and purposely burst to let the smartphone freefall (hence the name Skyfall). As the smartphone fell back to Earth, it recorded its 30 minute descent using the app.

Left. A meteorological balloon carrying infrasound sensors in a PolarTech insulated shipping container in 2015. The Skyfall set-up is very similar to the one shown and described here.

Right. Landing site, with payload box flipped upside down on the lower right and the parachute (blue and red) tangled with balloon shreds in the upper left.

Note

You can read more about the Skyfall project in the published paper: Skyfall: Signal Fusion from a Smartphone Falling from the Stratosphere.

Contents

• Getting started
  • 1. Download the Skyfall data from RedVox
  • 2. Set up your software environment
    • 2.1. Clone the Skyfall Github repository
    • 2.2. Install requirements
• Running Skyfall
  • 1. Update the Configuration File
  • 2. Run the code
    • 2.1. Introduction: skyfall_intro.py
    • 2.2. More scripts
    • 2.3. What to do next?