Balloon With Students' GoPro Attached Lost, Found 2 Years Later With Stunning Space Footage

In June 2013, Bryan Chan and four of his Stanford classmates launched a weather balloon from Tuba City, Arizona.

The balloon was outfitted with a GoPro Hero3 camera, Sony camcorder and a Samsung Galaxy Note II phone for GPS tracking.

The plan was for the balloon to land in an area with cell coverage so they could track it down easily using the GPS on the phone. But the coverage maps they looked at weren’t accurate.

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The balloon landed in a dead zone in the vast Arizona desert, and they thought their footage was lost forever.

Then, something amazing happened. Chan explained in a Reddit post:

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!

The result is some spectacular footage of the balloon’s rise, its peak at more than 18.5 miles above the Earth’s surface, and its plummet back down to the ground. Flight time: 98 minutes.

Patch reached out to Bryan to hear more of this amazing story, and we hope to hear back from him soon.

In the meantime, take a look:

Image via YouTube