When the sky over rural West Texas turned suddenly stranger, Ann Walter looked out from the fence of her home in Edmonson and saw something massive drift toward her. A huge parachute, the size of a 30‑foot fan, billowed in the wind and then slammed into her neighbor’s wheat field. In the wreckage was a boxy stack of scientific gear, covered in NASA stickers and the weight of a small SUV.
The sight made Walter call the Hale County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff David Cochran told her that NASA had been searching for a piece of equipment that had gone missing. “It’s crazy,” Walter said. “You don’t realize how big it is until you’re on the ground.”
NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which sends unmanned, high‑altitude balloons more than 20 miles up to study stars, galaxies and black holes, later contacted Walter. The balloon facility suspects the piece launched from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the launch site about 140 miles west of Edmonson. The equipment was hitched to a massive parachute and crashed into plain field left by a day‑old launch.
Witnesses say a NASA research team pulled the cargo out with a truck and trailer. Walter and her husband, Hayden, caught the event on camera. “It was kind of surreal,” she said. “I was part of this accidental field trip. It was a very cool experience.”
The crew sent the gear back to NASA’s facilities, but the agency’s reporters have declined to comment while the federal government faces a shutdown. The Columbia facility’s website still lists new launches from Fort Sumner, showing the program’s ongoing schedule.
For residents like Walter, the drifting balloon turned a quiet Texas summer into a moment of international science. NASA’s science balloons continue to lift clean air and new data out of place, then bring it back to Earth—sometimes literally in a wheat field in West Texas.
Source: New York Post
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