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.
