Students and faculty at the Harmony Science Academy have a lot to celebrate now that their weather balloon project they launched last March was recovered by a North Texas rancher after having gone missing for an entire year.

The weather balloon project was supposed to measure atmospheric pressure and winds. Attached to the balloon was a GPS tracking device that collected on the extreme West Texas weather conditions. After six months of preparation, Mehmet Gokcek, an instructor at the academy, and his students launched their weather balloon on a weekend in March. The balloon successfully traveled 85,000 feet in the air, but a miscalculation in the required amount of helium and high wind speeds led the balloon to soar much further than expected.

The entire launch and retrieval process was only supposed to take three hours, but the balloon managed to fly off the radar. The students considered it a lost hope.

“It was pretty devastating because we were actually looking forward to retrieving the information seeing what the footage what the cameras had caught,” said Aliza Escamilla, a senior at the academy. “We wanted to see the type of data we had received.”

However, just a couple of weeks ago, Gokcek received an email from a North Texas rancher that he had found the rogue equipment on his ranch, located just shy of the Texas-Oklahoma border. Thankfully, Gokcek had attached labels to the equipment that had his contact information on them.

“When I saw that email, I thought someone was just playing a prank on me! It was quite bit of a surprise,” said Gokcek.

“I thought my teacher [Gokcek] was playing a joke on me, I was like ‘no way,’” said Scott Southard, a senior at Harmony Science Academy. “We actually predicted it to land way closer than that. So we did chase it for a really long time and crazy part of it is it landed half a mile from Red River. If it would have landed in the river, it would have been washed away.”

Soon after receiving the good news, Gokcek and his team of students traveled to Billy Watson’s ranch in Stanfield, Texas. Watson happened to come across the materials as he was checking on his cattle.

“We were just curious as to what it was,” said Watson.

“He was just at the right place at the right time,” said Escamilla. “He actually looked into all the equipment that was around and thought, ‘you know, this could be something really important.’”

Despite some scratches and torn edges, the equipment is still usable and is now back at the academy. Now, the students are working on processing the data and video captured on the cameras that were attached to the balloon.

The class realized that the fault in their original plan was that they had not used enough helium for the balloon. Since then, they’ve recalibrated and say they look forward to more weather balloon launches in the future.

As they say, what goes up, must come down…even if that means one year later.