One year and 2 days after the launch, when we had pretty much given up hope of ever retrieving our previous payload, a parcel arrived, as promised, at the Chief Engineer’s home address. We convened the team and very excitedly began the unravel.

At this point the excitement was weighed evenly with concern that on opening the parcel we may find a collection of weather beaten and ultimately broken contents. Worst of all, what if the SD Card was damaged? What if the camera didn’t work at all?

Inside the brown paper wrapping was a box, which we examined and at first thought may not in fact belong to us, having a label addressed to someone else on the front and bearing no resemblance to anything we’d included in the payload.

However, the first thing we saw upon opening the box was the following letter …. and wow, what an amazing read!

Firstly, what an amazing, thoughtful and generous fellow the author of the above letter must be. Not only did he find our treasure, realize what it was, take it by train to Scotland and post it back intact, but most amazingly he wrote this fantastic letter filling in all the details, including time, place and even grid references, that completely cleared away the fog that had surrounded our missing balloon and box for 367 days.

Thank you Sam, from all of us.

After reading the final paragraph, you might imagine the anticipation with which we located the SD Card inside the camera – which was in perfect condition – and got ready to view its contents. Our anticipation was heightened by the import software on the laptop which showed miniscule postage stamp size previews of the 192 photos on the card.

And here is what we saw: (note: they’re pretty big files, so may take a while to display when clicked 😉