Long Lost GoPro Footage From Camera that Fell From the Edge of the Space Recovered

In 2013, a group of friends launched a weather balloon a few miles out of Tuba City Arizona, attached to the weather balloon was a 3D printed casing and a GoPro.

After climbing upward for 87 minutes, the weather balloons burst sending the camera down to earth as planned.

The crew was supposed to then go ahead and retrieve the camera when it fell and check out the video.

The crew however was unable to find the camera upon landing and eventually gave up.

Two years later, a hiker found the rubble.

Bryan Chan who launched the camera explained on Reddit:

“The whole project took myself and four friends a couple months of planning. We almost canceled the whole thing because helium cost 4x more than we were budgeting. As for the communications and attempted recovery (warning, about to get technical):

We used GPS on a smartphone to continuously log the phone’s location on its memory card. The standard GPS receiver these days can track your phone well above 100,000 ft – there used to be a limitation of 60,000 ft but that was recently lifted. The harder issue was to figure out how the phone can communicate to us. We used an app (myTracks or something similar, I forgot) to have the phone text us its GPS location once it got signal as it was returning to Earth (about ~3000 ft altitude).

We planned our June 2013 launch at a specific time and place such that the phone was projected to land in an area with cell coverage. The problem was that the coverage map we were relying on (looking at you, AT&T) was not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it. We didn’t know this was the problem at the time – we thought our trajectory model was far off and it landed in a signal dead zone (turns out the model was actually quite accurate). The phone landed ~50 miles away from the launch point, from what I recall. It’s a really far distance considering there’s hardly any roads over there!

TWO YEARS LATER, 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!”

Check it out: