The launch of NASA’s Nuclear Compton Telescope in Australia met with a tragic end today when high winds caught the helium balloon carrying  the sensitive equipment ripped it from the crane it was anchored on and was dragged along the ground, after hitting an SUV. The NCT is a multimillion dollar observation platform designed to study gamma rays. Gamma rays don’t normally pierce through our atmosphere, so its difficult to study on earth.

If you’re curious, it’s not named after a suburb of L.A., it was named after Arthur Compton, an American physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Compton Effect (scattering of X-rays).