After three months of looking — the Gilberts found the stratoballoon! Or rather, a local farmer did, when he saw the orange parachute start to get sucked into his combine. Thank goodness he was able to stop the machinery before the capsule got mangled too badly. Check out the report:

The Gilberts also got featured in this great news story on our local CBS affiliate. But my favorite part is, as I expected, all the beautiful, beautiful data. Mark’s written some in-depth posts outlining all the different metrics they were able to track, and plotting them in fascinating ways. He’s put together 2-d graphs of the flight data, mapped its GPS data on Google Earth, and then gives a writeup on how he got all the data into and out of the SD card that did all the logging. So cool!

Congrats, Gilberts, on a successful end to an incredible, two-year journey! I’m glad to have been a small part of it.