Samsung's 'Space Selfie' satellite made a crash landing on a Michigan couple's property

October 27, 2019

Samsung's 'Space Selfie' satellite made a crash landing on a Michigan couple's property

space selfie

A Michigan couple had a close encounter with a Samsung satellite which crash-landed in their yard on Saturday morning.
Nancy Welke of Merrill, Michigan told the Gratiot County Herald that she was baffled by a loud noise on her property. Upon investigating, she found a four-legged object that was still flashing and humming in her front yard.
The satellite was part of Samsung's 'Space Selfie' campaign and came just days after actress Cara Delevigne took the service's first selfie at an event in London.
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A Michigan couple had a close encounter with a Samsung satellite which crash-landed in their yard on Saturday morning.

Nancy Welke of Merrill, Michigan, discovered the satellite on her rural property just before 9 a.m. local time on Saturday morning.

"Unbelievable," Welke wrote in a caption alongside the photo which she posted Facebook. "Look what just fell out of the sky and 911 is baffled and it is caught in our tree."

Welke also posted a video of when she went to investigate the unidentified object.

"You never know what's gonna happen," she said in the video. "This baby fell out of the sky and landed in our yard."

"It's never boring on the Welke farm."

Samsung's logo can be seen printed on the white structure.

Welke told the Gratiot County Herald on that she and her husband were preparing to let their horses out when they heard a loud crash from their front yard. When Welke looked out the window, she said she was confused by the four-legged object that was still flashing and humming after it hit the ground.

Welke said the object included an aluminum foil-wrapped box and solar panels. Inside, she found two large cameras and one Samsung cellphone.

space selfie

The structure was just half of a balloon launched by Samsung Europe for a "Space Selfie" campaign that allowed customers to send their selfies into the Earth's stratosphere via a Galaxy S10 5G smartphone. The phone was supposed to receive photos from Earth and layer them over real-time shots of the planet for an out-of-this-world take on an ordinary selfie.

The discovery of the satellite came just days after actress Cara Delevigne kicked off the campaign at an event in London, taking the first selfie of the service that was supposed to run until October 31.

The person who picked up the contraption from Welke's home told her it was launched from Iowa on Friday with the purpose of taking photos. The representative said he was from Raven Industries, a technology company based in South Dakota.

The satellite's landing came around the same time local authorities closed a portion of a nearby road to remove the large, deflated balloon from power lines. Some residents had their electricity cut off for two hours while crews worked to remove the deflated balloon, according to ABC News.

In a widely circulated statement, a spokesperson for Samsung Europe said it was a planned descent that was complicated by the weather.

"Earlier today, Samsung Europe's SpaceSelfie balloon came back down to earth," the statement read. "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. No injuries occurred and the balloon was subsequently retrieved. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused."

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