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, 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."

Ann Walter observed a bulky object drifting across the sky above her rural West Texas home that later landed in a neighbor's wheat field. The object was a boxy piece of scientific equipment about the size of an SUV, attached to a large parachute and marked with NASA stickers. Local authorities were contacted and Hale County officials confirmed NASA searched for the missing equipment. The payload originated from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which launches unmanned high-altitude balloons from Fort Sumner to carry telescopes studying stars, galaxies and black holes. NASA personnel recovered the instrument with a truck and trailer.

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