Imagine waking up one morning to a commotion outside, looking out at your front yard, and seeing what appears to be a satellite — still making noises — that has crashed and landed right in front of your home.
That was the situation that greeted Nancy Welke, in a rural Michigan town, over the weekend when a satellite connected to Samsung’s recently-launched “SpaceSelfie” marketing campaign fell from space. The debris, which Samsung described as a low-altitude “balloon,” but which likely resembles most people’s idea of a small satellite, included solar panels that look like wings and a box wrapped in aluminum foil.
The box was marked “SpaceSelfie” and reportedly included two cameras and a Samsung phone inside. “Look what just fell out of the sky and 911 is baffled and it’s caught up in our tree,” Welke marveled in a Facebook post about the discovery. According to the local Gratiot County Herald, the crash happened around 8:45 a.m. Saturday before the horses were let out on the property.
Samsung gave a statement to ABC News about “Samsung Europe’s SpaceSelfie balloon,” noting that it had been scheduled to return to earth once “weather conditions resulted in an early soft landing in a selected rural area.”
As for the SpaceSelfie campaign itself, Samsung launched it just a few days ago. The idea was for people to upload selfies to a Samsung website, and the company would overlay them onto a real-time shot of earth from space.
Samsung used actress Cara Delevingne to kick off the promotion at an event in London, with Cara’s image captured via her Galaxy S10+ and “sent up to space” so that an image of earth could be used as a backdrop. In a statement, Samsung Europe chief marketing officer Benjamin Braun said about the event: “Our relentless pioneering spirit continues to show that amazing things happen on a Samsung screen — even from the stratosphere.”
