The five Stanford University students worked hard and spent months planning their science experiment before hurling their helium balloon. After attaching a smartphone and two cameras to the balloon, they released it on the Arizonian desert just north of Tuba City.
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Stanford alumni Bryan Chan told ABC News that the GoPro and a phone with a GPS was launched near the Grand Canyon on June 8, 2013 on a high-altitude weather balloon to gather data for his aerospace engineering dissertation. However, all their plans failed when they found that communication with the smartphone had been ruined. The GoPro and camcorder recorded video, while the phone took still images.
However, the video expedition suffered some technical mishaps as the payload had fallen over to the desert floor some 90 minutes into the aerial voyage, at an altitude measuring 18 miles. Surprisingly enough, all of it remained intact, even though it spent the next two years there.
But the camera disappeared during the long plummet back to earth when the team lost contact with a mobile phone which was attached to it.
The phone crash-landed at a velocity of 50 miles from the original launch point and settled in an unspecified patch of sand.
“A woman who works at AT&T was on a hike one day and spotted our phone in the barren desert”, a group member wrote on Reddit. The camera and phone was traced to the owners using the SIM card and returned.
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“We’re blown away by how many people love the video”, Chan said. The footage takes viewers from a ground view to a bird’s view then reveals a beautiful view from space.
