A group of 5 friends decided to go on a mission in planning to record the perfect GoPro shot which then unexpectedly look them two years to get the footage back. As per Fox News, the GoPro took the camera from the terrain of Tuba City Arizona. Their expedition was dated way back 2013 as they were determined to capture the breath taking aerial view of the Grand Canyon. They attached their GoPro device to a weather balloon in which they linked into a Samsung Galaxy Note II.
After reaching an altitude of 18 miles with a fight time of approximately 90 minutes, the device fell on the desert floor where it stayed hidden for about two years. They were using their smart phone's GPS but it encountered errors along the way.
The user under the name of Trexarmss then stated on their Reddit post:
We used GPS on a smartphone to continuously log the phone's 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 (myTracks or something similar, I forgot) to have the phone text us its GPS location once it got signal as it was returning to Earth (about ~3000 ft altitude).
We planned our June 2013 launch at a specific time and place such that the phone was projected to land in an area with cell coverage. The problem was that the coverage map we were relying on (looking at you, AT&T) was not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it.
We didn't know this was the problem at the time - we thought our trajectory model was far off and it landed in a signal dead zone (turns out the model was actually quite accurate). The phone landed ~50 miles away from the launch point, from what I recall. It's a really far distance considering there's hardly any roads over there!
He then added:
"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!"
