‘It’s kind of surreal that it happened to us’: Rural West Texas woman witnesses NASA space junk as it lands in her neighbor’s yard
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...
