SD Memory Card Survives 5 Days at Sea!

SD Memory Cards

In July 2005, an SD memory card was retrieved from the remains of a doomed weather balloon, and surprisingly all the data was still intact on it! There was also a digital camera attached to the cords of that balloon, but unfortunately it could not survive the destructive landing of the balloon when it crashed in the sea and remained there for 5 days. Much to the surprise of the crew who found the remains on the beach, the 128 megabyte SD memory card was a treasure for them.

"After visiting the scene of the wreck, the excited students
raced back to the UC-Santa Cruz lab with the digital cameras memory card, where they dried it out and slipped it into a PCs 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.

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."

[http://articles.simplysearch4it.com]

SD Memory Cards