A stratospheric balloon flown by X —Google holding company Alphabet Inc's moonshot factory— landed in Peruvian sugar firm Agrolmos' cane fields in northern Lambayeque region, surprising workers.
A balloon-retrieval instruction sheet found attached to the device, launched on April 6, stresses the need to allow recovery of the equipment for subsequent analysis.
Representatives of balloon-powered Internet
initiative Project Loon thus arrived in the area to arrange for the retrieval.
"We coordinated with local traffic control authorities to carry out a slow, safe balloon landing in La Misteriosa zone, north of Chiclayo," Project Loon indicated.
Lastly, project representatives informed a special team is on its way to retrieve the balloon and take it back to their California labs for flight data analyses.
Project Loon
Project Loon is an initiative developed by X The Moonshot Factory —formerly known as Google X— that produces Internet-beaming balloons to provide Internet access to rural and remote areas.
Following Coastal El Niño floods and landslides earlier this year, Project Loon partnered with the Peruvian Government and Telefonica to provide this service to tens of thousands of affected citizens who would otherwise not have had connectivity.
Loon balloons float 20 km up in the stratosphere and so have the potential to extend connectivity to where it is needed regardless of what's happening below.
This way, Project Loon provided over 160 GB —enough to send and receive around 30 million WhatsApp messages or 2 million emails— over a combined area of 40,000km2.
(END) SDC/MAO/DHT/MVB