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, 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 said. “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, did not return messages Thursday. A message left with the balloon facility also was not immediately returned.
A launch schedule on the balloon facility’s website shows a series of launches from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) 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, and uses 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 capture 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.”