meteorological balloon

Memory cards from space!

Samsung

Ever wondered how durable an SD card is? Could you drop it in the sea? How about hit it with a hammer? Spatter it with paint? I don’t fancy doing any of those things to my memory cards, but Samsung has come up with a fairly novel way to test its SD cards’ durability, and you fancy getting involved, you have the opportunity to, too.

100 SD cards are going to be attached to paper planes and then dropped from a meteorological balloon, 30,000 metres above the ground. No, Samsung doesn’t need help folding the paper planes; what it needs help with is the content of the SD cards.

Want to see one of your pictures (or a film, or a message) sent 30,000 above sea-level and come back to earth on the wings of a paper plane? Then pay a visit to the project website. You can upload your snippets of gorgeousness there.

Launch day is in mid-October, and takes place at a secret location in Cambridgeshire. How very James Bond.

If you’re lucky enough to retrieve one of the planes, and they might get as far as Siberia, there are picture instructions telling you how to test the SD card to see if it survived, and where to re-upload the images to prove that it did.

For a good giggle, there’s the promotional video, too. Take a look: