NASA Helium Balloon Crash Destroys Telescope

A Huge NASA balloon loaded with a telescope painstakingly built to scan the sky at wavelengths invisible to the human eye crashed in the Australian outback Thursday, destroying the million astronomy experiment and just missing nearby onlookers, according to Australian media reports. In dramatic video released by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the giant 400 foot balloon is seen just beginning to lift its payload, then the telescope gondola appears to unexpectedly come loose from its carriage. The telescope crashes through a fence and overturns a nearby parked sport utility vehicle before finally stopping. "No one was injured. A mishap investigation board is being convened," NASA officials said in a statement released late Thursday. The attempted balloon telescope launch took place at the Alice Springs Balloon Launching Centre, near the town of Alice Springs, in the northern territory of Australia. The wayward balloon overturned one car, but missed another parked nearby with local Alice Springs couple Stan and Betty Davies, who had come to watch the launch, still inside. "We were sitting in our car and preparing to move it out of the way and we were actually about a foot of being wiped out," ABC quoted Davies as saying. The balloon was carrying the Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT), a gamma-ray telescope built by astronomer Steven Boggs and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, California to study astrophysical sources in space. The ...