NYT - GoPro video of Grand Canyon found by hiker in desert

Strapped to a weather balloon bound for space, this GoPro camera soared almost 100,000 feet, into the stratosphere, to capture high-resolution footage of the Grand Canyon in 2013. An hour and a half into its flight the balloon burst and the camera plummeted back to earth.

It was two years before anyone would find the camera, which was lost in the Arizona desert. Fortuitously, the breathtaking footage was retrieved after an AT&T agent hiking in the desert stumbled upon the box about 50 miles from its launch point earlier this year and returned it to its owners. Last week the researchers shared the video of the GoPro’s herculean adventure from the fringes of space.

The footage shows a blend of browns and tans with a few streets and rivers that become more faint as the balloon floats higher. As the craft nears its highest point, the black of space enters the screen. An hour and 27 minutes into the voyage, when the balloon reaches an approximate altitude of 98,660 feet, it pops into what looks like white confetti against the darkness, and sends the camera plunging.

The team that launched the craft consisted of students from Stanford University. Their original goal was to obtain video of the Grand Canyon that they could modify with a special camera technique that one of the team members had developed, called fluid lensing.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/science/gopro-balloon-footage-of-earth.html?WT.mc_id=2015-KWP-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=45522&kwp_4=256068&kwp_1=191479&_r=0