Update: Gigantic NASA balloon crash in Australia (video)

NASA says no one was hurt in huge NASA balloon accident in Australia.

By , SPACE.com Managing Editor

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    The giant NASA science balloon being inflated at the launch site near Alice Springs. The same balloon crashed during take-off on Thursday smashing its multi-million USD payload. The balloon, the size of a football field when inflated is designed to float up to 25 miles, deep in the stratosphere to measure X-rays and gamma rays sent out by various stars and galaxies, then flutter back down to the Alice Springs launch site.
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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 $2 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 (121-meter) balloon is seen just beginning to lift its payload, then the telescope gondola appears to unexpectedly come loose from its carriage. The telescope crashesthrough 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.

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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 telescope was dragged about 450 feet (137 meters) before finally coming to a stop, NASA officials said.




"Damage to the NCT payload, project assets and area surroundings are currently being assessed," NASA officials added in their statement.

Ravi Sood, director of the Alice Springs Balloon Launching Centre and a professor at Australia's University of New South Wales, confirmed that no one was hurt in the incident, but added that sometimes balloon launches can go awry.





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