School's Lego man goes on out-of-this-world adventure

Have you ever had a lesson at school which ended with a big lovely surprise?

That's exactly what happened to pupils at one primary school in Shropshire.

At first they thought they'd lost their weather balloon, just minutes after launching it towards space.

However they managed to track it down and had quite the shock when they decided to watch the footage back from the on-board camera.

They discovered that the balloon - along with its passenger Dan the Lego man - had been on an out-of-this-world adventure!

What happened to Dan the Lego man?

Staff and schoolchildren at Gobowen Primary School thought all was lost when the tracker on their weather balloon went offline.

The balloon was being used as part of a science project to measure temperature and wind speed as it flew across the sky.

It had a small camera on board as well as one passenger – Dan the Lego man.

The school thought it would land somewhere in Derbyshire but they lost contact and thought it was all over.

However, it turned out that Dan had other sights to see.

To everyone's surprise the tracker came back online the following day, showing that the balloon had popped and landed in the nearby county of Nottinghamshire.

Video footage from the flight shows that too much helium in the balloon meant that Dan rose up through the clouds and higher and higher above the Earth.

After more than an hour, the smiling Lego man was making his way towards space.

However, soon after the balloon popped and Dan started hurtling back down to Earth at speed.

He plummeted thousands of feet, crash-landing in a quarry in Newark-on-Trent.

After discovering the balloon was back from its galactic adventure - it was retrieved along with Dan, who was still full of smiles.