A group of adventurous students lost track of their GoPro camera after using a weather balloon to send it 98,000 feet (29,880 meters) into outer space. They got it back two years later. The lost-and-found footage of the smartphone's action camera includes breathtaking views of the Grand Canyon from the edge of Earth's atmosphere.
Bryan Chan was the owner of the camera. In 2013 he and his four friends had attached the action camera to a helium weather balloon, and then launched it near Arizona's famous canyon.
The young men were going to use GPS to track the balloon's location. That would have made it much easier to recover the camera after it dropped back to Earth.
However, their plan was not successful. As the phone plunged to the ground it lost its signal.
Chan stated in a Reddit post that the smartphone's GPS logged the device's location non-stop. It saved the data on its memory card.
The students at predicted that the handset would land within its cell coverage area, but the AT&T coverage map they had used was inaccurate. Thus, they lost track of the mobile device.
A hiker accidentally found the long-lost phone on the ground over two years after the friends stopped their search for it. Ironically she worked for AT&T, according to Daily Mail.
The woman used the smartphone's SIM card to local Chan. He and his pals have since then posted the amazing footage on YouTube.
The video includes spectacular clips of the Grand Canyon. It also shows the balloon launching in June 2013, bursting at maximum altitude after its 87-minute flight to the stratosphere, and plummeting towards the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, according to Budapest Report.
Here is a video of the footage taken by the GoPro camera from outer space: