Cambridge University’s student Spaceflight Society has come to the help of the West Country Cheesemakers who lost contact with a chunk of cheese they launched into space.

The Cheesemakers wanted to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landings in a unique fashion. They decided to project a truckle of Cheddar 30km into space at 4am on Tuesday. This is as an ironic twist as the moon is widely depicted as being made from cheese.

Since the launch, communication with the cheese chunk has been lost, as its GPS system and transmitter are no longer functioning. This makes it impossible to track the movement of the wedge in space or where it will have landed back on earth.

Having noticed the plight of the Cheesemakers, the University’s Spaceflight Society offered its assistance. The team used software that they had already developed for balloon flights to aid the Cheesemakers.

Using the flight data obtained from the Cheesemakers they were able to use the software to predict where the Cheddar is likely to land.

Ed Moore of the Spaceflight Society said:

“We ran our prediction software and got a landing location that puts it down about 2 miles south of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire.”

As the lost cheese has no functioning transmitter it will ultimately be up to local walkers to find its exact whereabouts.

Ed Moore added: “Intrepid scavengers looking for an excuse to open that bottle of space-port may want to think twice, the freezing temperatures of the upper atmosphere may have caused the cheese to shatter and split. On the other hand, if the wedge has survived its rind trip, the ants have probably already helped themselves.”

The Spaceflight Society has also previously helped school children launch their favourite teddy bears in to space.

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