For reasons that aren't immediately clear, a team of five friends from Harvard University sent a hamburger into space in late October. They called their stunt "Operation Skyfall."
The hamburger was purchased from B.good, a local restaurant. It was left to age for a few days and then covered with a layer of spray-on varnish to better withstand winds on its journey through the upper atmosphere.
The sandwich was mounted onto an apparatus with a GoPro camera and a GPS, which was then attached to a helium ballon, according to the video's YouTube description. As seen in the video, the hamburger rose to an altitude of 30,000 meters (about 98,425) feet before the balloon popped and sent it and its rigging spiraling dramatically downward.
The team recovered the camera days later in some woods north of Boston, about 130 miles from its launch site in Sturbridge, Mass. The rig landed in a tree, and the team tried unsuccessfully to shoot it down with a bow and arrow. Eventually, a storm knocked the camera out of the tree, and the video was recovered.
This isn't the first time that footage of an object sent into space in a weather balloon has gone viral.
In February, an incoming MIT student sent the tube that her acceptance letter arrived in into space using a similar setup.
In January, a Canadian teenager sent a Lego man into the stratosphere, achieving an altitude of about 80,000 feet.