Space junk goes rogue and touches down in rural Texas
A woman in Texas sees an unidentified flying object the size of an SUV drifting through the sky. Little does she know she would soon get a call from NASA.
In a rural town in Texas, a woman, Ann Walter, stepped outside her home to see a massive unidentified flying object drifting through the sky.
The object was bulky, the size of an SUV, and was coming over her land in slow motion. Finally, the object landed in her neighbor's wheat field.
While this sounds like the opening scene of “Close Encounters,” this object was real and was sitting in her neighbor's yard.
The object was attached to a large parachute and seemed to be some kind of scientific equipment.
Walter called the sheriff’s office and soon found out who the space junk belonged to – NASA.
A sheriff from the Hale County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that NASA had been searching for the equipment, Phys Org reports.
While the equipment was covered in NASA stickers, Walter still didn’t understand what the object was or why it had landed at her front door.
After she alerted authorities, Walter received a call from NASA itself, specifically from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.
The facility launches large-scale (400 ft diameter), unmanned, high-altitude (120,000 feet) research balloons that track and recover scientific experiments, the website reads.
A launch from Fort Sumner in New Mexico, around 140 miles west of where the equipment crash-landed, coincides with when the equipment was found.
NASA researchers later came to pick up the equipment, which they said they’d launched from Fort Sumner a day earlier.
The equipment was supposedly being used to map information about stars, galaxies, and black holes.
"It's kind of surreal that it happened to us and that I was part of it," Walter told Phys Org,.
"It was a very cool experience."
While this incident might seem rare, NASA has been criticized before for its flying space junk landing in unintended places.
Space debris once hit a house in Florida, causing significant damage. “It tore through the roof and went through two floors. Almost hit my son,” the property owner said in a post on X.
NASA previously told Cybernews that it had collected the item with the homeowner and would analyze the object at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida “as soon as possible” to determine its origin.
The property owners demanded that NASA pay for the damages, but whether NASA ever did is unknown.
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