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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt’s crazy, because when you’re standing on the ground and see something in the air, you don’t realize how big it is,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was probably a 30-foot parachute. It was huge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Walter said she soon got a call from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility<\/a>, which launches large unmanned, high altitude research balloons more than 20 miles into the atmosphere to conduct scientific experiments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Officials at NASA, which is impacted by the ongoing government shutdown<\/a>, did not return messages Thursday. A message left with the balloon facility also was not immediately returned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n