Rubber chicken sent into space

A rubber chicken called Camilla was attached to a helium balloon and sent into space to test radiation from a solar storm.

Students from California sent Camilla 25 miles up into the sky where she was exposed to high-energy solar protons.

On the outside of her knitted space suit, the chicken wore radiation badges to calculate the radiation levels she was exposed to.

Her spacecraft was a modified lunchbox that carried four cameras, a cryogenic thermometer and two GPS trackers.

Camilla was launched into the sky twice - once on March 3 before the solar storm and again on March 10 while the storm was in full swing.

After two and a half hours in the sky, the balloon popped, as planned, and Camilla parachuted safely back to Earth.

The Bishop Union High School students' experiment was part of their astrobiology project.

Later this year they hope to launch a species of microbes to find out if they can live at the edge of space.

Camilla is the mascot of Nasa's solar dynamics observatory and has more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.