Three British marketers took a tandoori lamb chop, strapped a GoPro camera and launched it into space. It was launched with a weather balloon. However, the hunk of meat disappeared for five long months. When the marketing team finally got their hands on the GoPro camera, it had an incredible footage of its ascent into space, reports The Independent.
It was part of a marketing stunt
On June 14 this year, novelist Nikesh Shukla and his friends took a 2-meter wide balloon, attached the tandoori chop and GoPro camera and launched it in the stratosphere. Rising at 325 meters per minute, the balloon went up about 31 kilometers in 95 minutes before bursting. The team also lost GPS contact, and had been hoping that the GPS would re-connect.
But extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere made sure that the GPS system didn’t survive the flight. The marketing team was using it as a stunt to promote Shukla’s novel Meatspace. They feared that they would never retrieve the GoPro footage or the lamb chop. But a few weeks later, a farm worker named Adam discovered the chop and camera in Manston, southern England. Adam informed the flight organizer Nick Hearne.
GoPro captures 100 minutes of incredible footage
Adam kept the marketing team on the edge for about four months. He would arrange to meet them, only to cancel the appointment every time. He would use different excuses and phone numbers each time. Only after Somerset Police tracked down Adam did he agree to meet the group earlier this month. Marketers were stunned to see the 100 minutes of footage filmed by GoPro, showing the lamb chop’s ascent through the clouds, into space and its downward journey to the Earth.
People use GoPro’s action cameras to film adventures. Some researchers use it to study the behavior of different animals such as bear and shark. A study conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) using GoPro cameras revealed that sharks behave aggressively when something intrudes into their territory.
