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Mendillo's flight, called 758N, lifted off as planned Oct. 1 from Fort Sumner, New Mexico (east of Alburqueque) as part of the fall 2025 flight campaign. 
Observations of the exoplanets wrapped up at about 1 a.m. local on Oct. 2, Mendillo explained, but the flight team waited until 6 a.m. to terminate the flight to allow for a safe landing zone. 
(You can see the flight path here, courtesy of NASA, and an alternate map of the path at the ballooning site StratoCat.)

NASA recovered the payload on Oct. 2 and officials drove it back to the launch facility that same day, Mendillo said. 
The experiment is now sitting at Wallops, awaiting the end of the shutdown so that it can be shipped back to Mendillo's university. But some results are already available.

Exoplanet hunter
Mendillo's experiment is called Planetary Imaging Coronagraph Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment for Debris Disks (PICTURE-D). 
The project is funded by a $7-million, five-year grant from NASA's Astrophysics Research and Analysis Program, according to UMass Lowell.

As the experiment's name implies, PLANET-D aims to advance technologies for exoplanet imaging—meaning taking direct pictures of exoplanets, as they orbit their parent stars. 
That's no easy feat for a telescope, as the stars are quite bright and the exoplanets are only faintly visible in dim reflected light, by comparison.

"We have been working on this specific experiment since 2022, and versions of it since 2005," said Mendillo, paying tribute to a large team of faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and students ranging in age from high school to graduate researchers. 
Several iterations have flown before: two NASA sounding rockets in 2011 and 2013 launched PICTURE and PICTURE-B, respectively, and the PICTURE-C experiment also flew twice on a high-altitude balloon in 2022.

"Our mission is designed to directly image distant solar systems in search of dust rings, asteroid belts and exoplanets," Mendillo said of PICTURE-D, which carries a 23-inch (60-centimeter) telescope. 
"We observed four different stars, including one binary [two-star] system, and collected thousands of images. We are just starting to catalog and process those data, and hope to present our findings in the next six months."

The first science result from PICTURE-D was an image of the Gamma Cassiopeiae binary star system located, as the name suggests, in the constellation Cassiopeia. 
"We took this image during the day, when sky backgrounds were too high for exoplanetary imaging," Mendillo said.

The primary star, called A, was blocked in the telescope's view by an instrument known as a coronagraph—a device that obscures the bright light of an object to let fainter objects nearby shine through. 
As a result, the secondary "B" star is visible in the image despite being 3,000 times dimmer than its companion.
"This image illustrates the difficulty of imaging exoplanets in reflected visible light. If that secondary star were actually a planet, it would be one million times dimmer," Mendillo said.

The researchers got the data they needed, although there were some minor issues during the flight that degraded the performance — something Mendillo says the team hopes to address the next time they fly PICTURE-D, in 2026 or 2027.
Eventually, the technologies they fly may be used on a future flagship NASA mission, such as the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory aiming to gaze at Earth-sized worlds in the 2040s.

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