We’re getting a look video captured on a GoPro camera that was launched into space by students at Stanford University.
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A unusual twist of fate brought the phone and the students back together two years later after an AT&T employee found the phone while hiking in the desert.
Bryan Chan told ABC News the group had attached a GoPro and a phone with Global Positioning System to the balloon near the Grand Canyon on June 8, 2013, and were supposed to recover it two hours later.
The team tried to use the Global Positioning System on the smartphone to track the devices, but ran into issues.
The expedition took a wrong turn after the payload fell to the desert floor 90 minutes into the trip at an altitude of about 18 miles.
According to the team, the problem involves a coverage map that they have been relying that was not totally accurate, where the phone did not get a signal when it returned back to Earth where they never heard from it again.
With the help of AT&T, she has identified the owner through its Sim Card and managed to return the equipment to Chan and his friends after a few weeks.
Apparently, the smartphone landed on a sandy patch some 50 miles from the original launching point.
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Members of the group recounted the wonderful journey that took a GoPro camera from the terrain of Tuba City, Ariz., to the edge of space and back in posts on YouTube and Reddit. Their unique objective was to get feature of the Grand Canyon that they could adjust with an exceptional camera strategy that one of the colleagues had created, called liquid lensing. As of Wednesday, the video has more than 3.5 million views.
