A lost GoPro attached to a weather balloon launched near the Grand Canyon in 2013 finally found its way back home and brought back videos and pictures from space.
GoPros are usually used to record wild stunts or adventurous group holidays. This time it’s different.
LOST GOPRO FOUND ITS WAY BACK HOME
Two years ago Bryan Chan and a few of his friends attached a 3D-printed chassis housing a GoPro, a Sony camcorder and a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 to a weather balloon. They hoped to record some breathtaking footage but they never thought they would actually find photos of the Grand Canyon from the stratosphere.
Since the beginning, things didn’t go according to the plan. Chan and Co. expected for months a text from their AT&T phone with the location of the landed cameras. That message never came and they considered their devices lost forever.
“The coverage map we were relying on was not accurate,” wrote Chan in a Reddit post. “The phone never got [a] signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it.”
TWIST OF FATE
But two years later the GoPro was found by a woman as she was hiking in the area. What’s even stranger is that the trekker works for AT&T.
“…in a twist of ironic fate, a woman who works at AT&T was on a hike one day and spotted our phone in the barren desert. She brings it to an AT&T store, and they identify my friend’s SIM card. We got the footage and data a few weeks later!,” Chan revealed.
Here’s the video of the GoPro trip to space. Enjoy.
(NOT SO) LOST GOPRO FOOTAGE FROM SPACE
From Neil Armstrong’s small step to Chris Hadfield’s David Bowie impression, videos have often transmitted what’s it like to be an astronaut is space, Wired reports.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, recently shared a video of a GoPro camera strapped to a metal fairing on a Falcon 9 rocket which captured incredible footage as that part of the rocket fell back to earth.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they chose Johann Strauss II’s “Blue Danube” from 2001: A Space Odyssey as the soundtrack.
Have you ever come across a lost GoPro space footage that you would like to share?
