NO UFO THIS!
Deepika Pasham

Hyderabad

Since morning on Wednesday there have been many queries and theories on Twitter, with several people making wild as well as seemingly informed guesses about a white object flying high in the sky.

“Any information on this bright spark kinda appearance in the early morning sky..? Pic taken from Indira Park, Hyderabad,” said Saikumar Lingampalli, while sharing a picture.

Amid a flurry of guesses about the object passing through the clouds, N Raghunandan, Director of the Planetary Society of India, also shared a video on Twitter and said: “I have been receiving calls from various people on what is the object in sky… On December 7, at approximately 7:30 am, an odd object was spotted in the sky. The object could be seen if one faced the east direction and looked up.This is a research balloon put out by an organization in Hyderabad called the National Balloon Facility.These balloons are released for atmospheric studies. This is a helium balloon that carries nearly 1,000 kilos of scientific instruments.”

The balloons, which carry up scientific instruments for research at high altitudes, are expected to reach heights between 30 km and 42 km, depending upon the experiments being undertaken, he added.

It was only then that curious city residents came to know for sure that it was a research balloon released for atmospheric studies.The National Balloon Facility, also known as the TIFR Balloon Facility, is a stratospheric-balloon launch base under the joint management of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Indian Space Research Organisation.