image via – youtube.com
Sometimes things and events that seem absolutely random in and of themselves can end up coming together to form one heck of a story. Whether it is truly random or fated to happen, this is one of those strange turn of events that turned out for the best.
In June a group of students sent a balloon to the edge of space over the Grand Canyon. Despite having planned out the detailed launch, and anticipating where it would eventually land, they were never able to find and recover the craft and the camera or cell phone attached to it.
However, two years later an eagle-eyed hiker in Arizona happened upon the wreckage and the long lost footage was found. The students put together a detailed video and shared it on YouTube so the world could enjoy the beautiful sights that were captured.
The short clip walks the viewer through the background events and all of the preparations that led up to the big launch. First the students tested the balloon with a parachute flight test by dropping it from a height off the ground.
Then they did trajectory planning, made computer models, planned out a custom designed structure, and printed it out in 3D. Finally the day came to send it up into space. The students started out on the road at nine in the morning and headed to a launch site 20 miles west of the Grand Canyon.
There they assembled the balloon and made some last minute adjustments to the spacecraft, switching on the GoPro Hero3 and cell phone which were attached to the chassis. At 10:46 it was launched and less than ten minutes later the balloon had already reached an altitude of 22,967 feet, which put it at a distance of 7 kilometers above Earth’s surface.
By the time an hour and twelve minutes had elapsed, the balloon was 86,558 feet up (26.4km). From that height the enormous Grand Canyon looks like a tiny feature way below on the Earth’s surface, and the curvature of the planet is clear to see. As the balloon spins around you can even catch a glimpse of the moon far off in the distance.
An hour and 27 minutes after launch the balloon reached its highest elevation, 98,660 feet (30.1km), and a clearer view of the Grand Canyon below is shown. That’s also when the craft began its violent descent back to Earth as slow motion reveals the moment the balloon popped and flew away from it.
By the time it landed upside down back on Earth’s surface among some dry grass scrub a full hour and 38 minutes had gone by. The video includes the computer models which show the launch and landing sites relative to the Grand Canyon, and the flight path trajectory as well. Despite these calculations and all of the planning, the students were unable to find the remains of their craft and the video of its journey.
Two years later the camera was found and picked up by a hiker in Arizona who tracked down and returned the footage to the team who launched it. They were able to recover the incredible video and the stunning images that it captured along its epic journey into the stratosphere and back down.
The reason why it was lost in the first place was because there was no cell phone coverage in the area it landed, which the students were relying on to track it down. They had looked at inaccurate coverage maps provided by AT&T and thus the cell never received a signal when it came back to Earth.
The hiker who found the wreckage ironically worked at AT&T. She brought it to a company store and they identified the phones SIM card and tracked down the owner to send back the footage. Check out the awe inspiring film and revel in the beauty that is our home, planet Earth!
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