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Mendillo's flight, called 758N, lifted off as planned Oct. 1 from Fort Sumner, New Mexico (east of Alburqueque) as part of the fall 2025 flight campaign.
Observations of the exoplanets wrapped up at about 1 a.m. local on Oct. 2, Mendillo explained, but the flight team waited until 6 a.m. to terminate the flight to allow for a safe landing zone.
(You can see the flight path here, courtesy of NASA, and an alternate map of the path at the ballooning site StratoCat.)

NASA recovered the payload on Oct. 2 and officials drove it back to the launch facility that same day, Mendillo said.
The experiment is now sitting at Wallops, awaiting the end of the shutdown so that it can be shipped back to Mendillo's university. But some results are already available.

Exoplanet hunter
Mendillo's experiment is called Planetary Imaging Coronagraph Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment for Debris Disks (PICTURE-D).
The project is funded by a $7-million, five-year grant from NASA's Astrophysics Research and Analysis Program, according to UMass Lowell.

As the experiment's name implies, PLANET-D aims to advance technologies for exoplanet imaging—meaning taking direct pictures of exoplanets, as they orbit their parent stars.
That's no easy feat for a telescope, as the stars are quite bright and the exoplanets are only faintly visible in dim reflected light, by comparison.

"We have been working on this specific experiment since 2022, and versions of it since 2005," said Mendillo, paying tribute to a large team of faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and students ranging in age from high school to graduate researchers.
Several iterations have flown before: two NASA sounding rockets in 2011 and 2013 launched PICTURE and PICTURE-B, respectively, and the PICTURE-C experiment also flew twice on a high-altitude balloon in 2022.