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https://www.space.com/space-exploration/did-a-nasa-exoplanet-hunting-balloon-really-crash-in-texas-not-according-to-the-scientist-behind-the-flight
https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1976606914889896355
Did a NASA exoplanet-hunting balloon really 'crash' in Texas? Not according to the scientist behind the flight
October 15, 2025
A special exemption allowed a NASA-funded weather balloon to launch as planned Oct. 1, despite the ongoing government shutdown that began that day.
But news about the balloon, and an exoplanet-hunting experiment on board, got a little confused after touchdown.
When the balloon landed Oct. 2 in farmland in Hale County, Texas after a flight high in Earth's atmosphere, several local news reports suggested the balloon had crashed (or landed unexpectedly) — but that's not what happened, said experiment principal investigator Christopher Mendillo. "I'm sure they just had no information to go on and made some assumptions," Mendillo, a University of Massachusetts Lowell exoplanet researcher, told Space.com.
His team has been working on iterations of the planet-seeking experiment since 2005, launching on both sounding rockets and balloons.
"A team of talented NASA professionals monitors the [balloon] flight for the entire duration, and carefully chooses the landing site to avoid population centers, energy infrastructure, bodies of water, mountains, etc.," Mendillo said via email.
"Farm and ranch landings are quite common, and it is a credit to those involved that they found such a nice soft place to put us down [...] The balloon has no guidance or propulsion of any kind on board.
The flight team incorporates real-time tracking and weather data to predict exactly where the payload and balloon will land when they terminate the flight — within some range of uncertainty."
An unusual flight
NASA personnel worked hard earlier this fall to get Mendillo's experiment launched despite the looming shutdown, which furloughed 15,000 agency personnel after lawmakers in Washington, D.C. failed to pass a government funding bill before fiscal year 2025-26 began on Oct. 1.
The agency got an exemption to proceed with the balloon launch, he said. (NASA officials affiliated with the flight were not available for comment after Space.com reached out, due to the shutdown, according to automated out-of-office responses.)
The need to launch Oct. 1, and on no other date, was because of a phenomenon known as "atmospheric turnaround", which allows the balloon to launch in the morning and to stay up through the night.
Turnaround — a change in wind velocity — happens twice a year in the mid-latitudes of the stratosphere, a part of Earth's atmosphere, in the early spring and the late summer.
"Most years, turnaround lasts one to two weeks; this year it was one day, Oct. 1," Mendillo said.
"There was only one day in 2025 where we could launch our mission and meet our science and technology goals — and that was the day the government happened to shut down."
NASA launched Mendillo's exoplanet experiment aboard a research balloon provided by the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas (which is roughly two hours southeast of Dallas).
The facility is managed by a balloon program office located at Virginia's Wallops Flight Facility, operated by NASA's Goddard Space Center in Maryland.
The facility's website says it launches uncrewed and large (400-foot diameter) high-altitude balloons rated to fly to about 120,000 feet (nearly 37 km, or roughly the height of skydiver Felix Baumgartner's high-altitude jump in 2012). Columbia also tracks the balloons, and recovers the experiments on board.
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