Giant NASA balloon surprises rural Texas farm town
The NASA-sponsored mission by UMass Lowell images exoplanets and made an expected landing near Kress, Texas. Mission scientists say the balloon and payload were safely collected.
NASA giant balloon surprises rural Texas town
A NASA-sponsored balloon mission came down for a landing, surprising Ann Vincent Walter and her neighbors in Kress, Texas.
KRESS, Texas – Neighbors in North Texas were happy to see the NASA logo after a large and mysterious object came down in their small farm town.
Video shows the giant balloon parachuting down onto a field in Kress, Texas, on Oct. 2. Anne Vincent Walter captured video of the unusual moment and told Storyful News she called police.
"My husband and I saw a parachute in the sky that morning, and it ended up being a piece of large experimental equipment that landed in our neighbor’s wheat field," Walter said.
On the left, a NASA scientific balloon carrying the PICTURE-D mission for UMass Lowell, and on right, Ann Vincent Walter after the payload landed near her home in Kress, Texas on Oct. 2, 2025.
(Ann Vincent Walter via Storyful/UMass Lowell / NASA)
Walters said she was later contacted by NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and told it had been launched a day earlier from the launch facility 140 miles away. NASA's Scientific Balloon Program averages about 10-15 flights per year from six sites around the world, including Antarctica and New Zealand.
FOX Weather confirmed the NASA-sponsored balloon mission included the PICTURE-D instrument from the University of Massachusetts Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology (UMass Lowell).
The PICTURE-D balloon launched on Oct. 1 around 9:30 a.m. from Fort Sumner and reached 128,000 feet, flying for about 20 hours before landing near Edmonson, Texas, according to UMass Lowell. The team said the balloon landed safely, and the payload was recovered.
The PICTURE payload from UMass Lowell was designed to take images of worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, and their environments. Different iterations of PICTURE have flown several times over the past 20 years, with another flight planned in 2027.
Watch the launch, float and landing of PICTURE-C mission in 2022 in the video below.
Fittingly, the mission theme song is "Up, Up and Away" by The 5th Dimension.