Incredible GoPro video footage of the Grand Canyon filmed from space has been recovered after a two-year search. In 2013, Bryan Chan and a few of his friends encased a GoPro camera in a 3D-printed shell, attached it to a weather balloon, and then sent it into the stratosphere about 20 miles west of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, United States.
The amazing footage gives an aerial view of the Grand Canyon as the balloon ascends to the edge of space before bursting, sending the camera tumbling back down to Earth. But unfortunately for Chan and his colleagues, they couldnt find where the camera had landed.
Two years later, a hiker found the balloon debris and Chan and his GoPro camera have finally been reunited. In a Reddit post, Chan explained his story:
We used GPS on a smartphone to continuously log the phones 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 to have the phone text us its GPS location once it got signal as it was returning to Earth (about ~3000 ft altitude), he states.
Two years later, in a twist of ironic fate, a woman who works at AT and T was on a hike one day and spotted our phone in the barren desert. She brings it to an AT and T store, and they identify my friends SIM card. We got the footage and data a few weeks later!
