Imagine minding your own business, then spotting space debris plummeting from the sky! Witnesses in Texas called the police as an object the size of a truck suddenly crashed into a rural farm. Residents actually helped locate the space junk. 

Texas farm takes a sudden blow from NASA equipment 

Residents in Hale County, Texas, were in for a shock. While watching a beautiful evening sunset, many witnesses noticed an unidentified object quickly falling from the sky. 

One neighbor, Ann Vicent Walter, took a video of the object and sent it to her parents. She thought it was a weather balloon, but her parents disagreed. 

Then she made a call to the police. She described what she saw to the Hale County Sheriff’s Office. The officers talked to her and shared that NASA was currently trying to find and retrieve their equipment. 

The object was about the size of a truck. It was a large piece of experimental equipment attached to a parachute. It was launched from the Fort Sumner launch facility and got blown off course. 

Ann assisted the team in finding the equipment on a neighbor’s farm and got a once-in-a-lifetime experience to learn about it and ask questions. Luckily, the object didn’t land on any cars, farm animals, or buildings! 

The item was being used to help NASA determine if and where they may launch a satellite. According to the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Services (NESDIS), about 200 to 400 tracked objects enter the Earth’s atmosphere annually. 

That’s almost one every day, but smaller items typically burn up and disintegrate. Larger items typically land in the ocean, which covers 70% of the Earth’s surface, so humans are rarely affected.