The experience of a West Texas woman who found a piece of lost NASA scientific equipment that had fallen to Earth.
She saw a car-sized object above a Texas farm and found a wayward hunk of NASA equipment
When Ann Walter looked outside her rural West Texas home in Edmonson, Texas, she saw a bulky object slowly drifting across the sky. She was surprised to see what had landed in her neighbor's wheat field: a boxy piece of scientific equipment, approximately the size of a sport-utility vehicle, attached to a massive, approximately 30-foot parachute, and covered in NASA stickers.
Walter called the local sheriff's office and learned that NASA was, indeed, looking for a piece of lost equipment. Hale County Sheriff David Cochran confirmed that NASA officials had called his office in search of the item.
Walter soon spoke with a representative from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which launches large, unmanned, high-altitude research balloons more than 20 miles into the atmosphere for scientific experiments. She was told the equipment had been launched a day earlier from Fort Sumner, New Mexico (about 140 miles west of where it landed), and it uses telescopes to gather information about stars, galaxies, and black holes.
The researchers later arrived with a truck and trailer to pick up the equipment. Walter and her family were able to capture photos and videos before it was retrieved.
"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," Walter said. She called the experience "kind of surreal" and "a very cool experience."
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She saw a car-sized object above a Texas farm and found a wayward hunk of NASA equipment