Project Icarus was an experiment in 2009 to launch a camera into the stratosphere undertaken by MIT students, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh.
To keep the temperature of the batteries high enough for the camera to work it was heated by instant hand warmers.
In order to keep track of the vehicle's location a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone was included.
The device traveled to around 93,000 feet (28 km) before free falling back to Earth.
[3] The MIT students were not the first to take pictures of the Earth using helium balloons, but this experiment is noteworthy because it used inexpensive consumer products and did not require specialized hardware.