When Ann Walter looked outside her rural West Texas home, she didn't know what to make of the bulky object slowly drifting across the sky. She was even more surprised to see what actually landed in her neighbor's wheat field: a boxy piece of scientific equipment about the size of a sport-utility vehicle, attached to a massive parachute and adorned with NASA stickers. She called the local sheriff's office and learned that NASA, indeed, was looking for a piece of equipment that had gone lost. "It's crazy, because when you're standing on the ground and see something in the air, you don't realize how big it is," she tells the AP. "It was probably a 30-foot parachute. It was huge."
Walter said she soon got a call from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which launches large unmanned, high-altitude research balloons more than 20 miles into the atmosphere to conduct scientific experiments. Officials at NASA, which is impacted by the ongoing government shutdown, didn't return messages on Thursday; a message left with the balloon facility also wasn't immediately returned. A launch schedule on the balloon facility's website shows a series of launches from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, about 140 miles west of where the equipment landed.
Hale County Sheriff David Cochran confirmed that NASA officials called his office last week in search of the equipment. Walter said she ultimately spoke with someone at the balloon facility who told her it had been launched a day earlier from Fort Sumner, using telescopes to gather information about stars, galaxies, and black holes. "The researchers came out with a truck and trailer they used to pick it up," she said—but not before Walter and her family, who live in Edmonson, Texas, were able to take some photos and videos. "It's kind of surreal that it happened to us and that I was part of it," she said. "It was a very cool experience."
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