Lost GoPro footage recovered from DIY space project showing view of Grand Canyon from the edge of space. (Photo : Bryan Chan/Youtube)
Spectacular GoPro footage of the Grand Canyon was finally released as it went missing after two years, which eventually reunited five friends who took this extremely rare video from the Earth's stratosphere.
In 2013, the group composed of Bryan Chan, Ved Chirayath, Ashish Goel, Paul Tarantino and Tyler Reid, planned months ahead to capture the perfect shot and travelled to Tuba City in Arizona along with their handy GoPro cameras and bringing it to edge of space.
This project took unprecedented views of Earth and chronicled fantastic aerial views of the Grand Canyon with their trusty GoPro along with a video camera recorder and a Samsung Galaxy Note II, all attached on a weather balloon.
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. The team frantically tried to use their GPS on their smartphones in order to track the location of the devices but experienced some difficulties.
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.
Apparently, the smartphone landed on a sandy patch some 50 miles from the original launching point.
The team was surprised that two years later, in an ironic twist of fate, a woman who works from AT&T spotted their smartphone from the barren desert. She then brings the smartphone to an AT&T store where they identified one of the members' SIM card and obtained the footage and raw data a few weeks later.
This reunion lead to the uploading of this unique space balloon journey on Youtube that revealed their launch preparations, video footage and flight analysis. The footage transports viewers from a ground view to a bird's eye view perspective that showcases the amazing view of the Grand Canyon from the edge of space. To date, this video has more than 3,500,000 views since its upload last September 10.
