Samsung's 'space selfie' satellite crash lands in garden
'This baby fell out of the sky and landed in our yard,' says Michigan woman
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Your support makes all the difference.A Samsung satellite has crash-landed onto a Michigan property, just one week into its mission to send people’s selfies to space.
Nancy Welke discovered the four-legged object in her field in Merrill, Michigan, on Saturday morning as she was preparing to let her horses out.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” she said in a video posted to Facebook.
“This baby fell out of the sky and landed in our yard. It’s never boring on the Welke farm. Thank god there’s no horses out or it didn’t hit the house.”
Amid the wreckage Ms Welke found two large cameras and a Samsung smartphone, all of which were still in tact and "whirring".
The gadgets formed part of the South Korean technology giant’s SpaceSelfie campaign, which launched on 16 October with the hope of offering people “the chance to get their face in space”.
It was meant to continue until 31 October as a showcase of the firm’s 5G capabilities, while also demonstrating the resilience of its new Galaxy S10 5G smartphone.
“We are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible and with SpaceSeflie, we will show that amazing things continue to happen using Samsung technology – even from the edge of space,” Benjamin Braun, chief marketing officer of Samsung Europe, said ahead of the launch.
A high-altitude balloon was used to lift a box containing the phone to a height of up to 65,000 feet, though it is not yet clear whether the payload reached this height before crashing to Earth. Samsung claimed that the landing was planned but was slightly premature.
“During this planned descent of the balloon to land in the US, weather conditions resulted in an early soft landing in a selected rural area,” a spokesperson said. “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Some people were able to send their selfies to the space-bound phone before the accident, including model and actress Cara Delevigne.
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