The Sundarban 
The PICTURE-D instrument lifts off from Castle Sumner, Unique Mexico on Oct. 1, 2025. The flight would land in a discipline near Edmonson, Texas 20 hours later.
(Image credit: UMass Lowell)
A special exemption allowed a NASA-funded weather balloon to launch as planned Oct. 1, despite the ongoing authorities shutdown that began that day. Nevertheless news about the balloon, and an exoplanet-hunting experiment on board, obtained a dinky 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 stories advised the balloon had crashed (or landed rapidly) — but that’s no longer 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 labored hard earlier this fall to win Mendillo’s experiment launched despite the looming shutdown, which furloughed 15,000 agency personnel after lawmakers in Washington, D.C. failed to pass a authorities funding invoice prior to fiscal year 2025-26 began on Oct. 1.
The agency obtained an exemption to proceed with the balloon launch, he said. (NASA officials affiliated with the flight were no longer available for comment after Space.com reached out, due to the shutdown, according to automated out-of-workplace responses.)
The want to launch Oct. 1, and on no other date, was because of a phenomenon identified as “atmospheric turnaround”, which allows the balloon to launch in the morning and to stay up thru the night time. Turnaround — a change in wind pace — 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.”
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NASA launched Mendillo’s exoplanet experiment aboard a research balloon equipped 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 workplace located at Virginia’s Wallops Flight Facility, operated by NASA’s Goddard Space Heart in Maryland.
A look from the PICTURE-D balloon. (Image credit: UMass Lowell)
The facility’s internet region says it launches uncrewed and large (400-foot diameter) high-altitude balloons rated to waft to about 120,000 ft (nearly 37 km, or roughly the top of skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s high-altitude jump in 2012). Columbia also tracks the balloons, and recovers the experiments on board.
A map showing the balloon’s path. (Image credit: NASA/Google Maps)
Mendillo’s flight, called 758N, lifted off as planned Oct. 1 from Castle Sumner, Unique 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 till 6 a.m. to terminate the flight to allow for a safe landing zone. (You can gawk the flight path here, courtesy of NASA, and an alternate map of the path at the ballooning region StratoCat.)
The Reveal-D instrument prior to being launched on Oct. 1, 2025. (Image credit: Christopher Mendillo/UML)
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 pause of the shutdown so that it can be shipped back to Mendillo’s college. Nevertheless some results are already available.
A NASA research probe crash-landed in a Texas farm last week after being blown off beam.The probe came down on the farm of Ann and Hayden Walter in Edmonson, prompting the family to call the local sheriff’s department. pic.twitter.com/ENjwq5tKx5October 10, 2025
Exoplanet hunter
Mendillo’s experiment is called Planetary Imaging Coronagraph Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment for Debris Disks (PICTURE-D). The challenge 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 applied sciences for exoplanet imaging—meaning taking exclaim footage of exoplanets, as they orbit their parent stars. That’s no easy feat for a telescope, as the stars are reasonably gleaming and the exoplanets are easiest faintly considered in sad mirrored mild, 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, submit-doctoral researchers, and students ranging in age from high faculty to graduate researchers. Several iterations have flown prior to: two NASA sounding rockets in 2011 and 2013 launched PICTURE and PICTURE-B,
