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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed the mystery behind an unidentified object that hit the roof of a Florida house last month. The US space agency said it was a piece of space junk from instruments left on the International Space Station (ISS).
A cylindrical object that struck a house in Naples was taken to Kennedy Space Center on March 8 for analysis.
NASA confirmed that it was a metal support used to mount old batteries on a cargo pallet for disposal.
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“Based on the investigation, the agency determined that the debris is a piece of NASA flight support equipment used to mount batteries on cargo pallets,” NASA said in a blogpost.
The weight of the scrap was 0.7 kg. It was 4 inches long and about 1 1/2 inches wide.
It states, “The object is made of the metal alloy Inconel, weighs 1.6 pounds (0.7 kg), measures 4 inches (10 cm) in height and 1.6 inches in diameter.”
The pallet was removed from the space station in 2021, and it was expected that the load would eventually burn up completely upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, but a piece survived.
The US space agency also promised to investigate how the debris escaped complete destruction in the atmosphere, adding that it would update its engineering models accordingly.
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It says, “NASA is committed to operating responsibly in low Earth orbit and reducing as much risk as possible to the safety of people on Earth when space hardware is released.”
Last month, Alejandro Otero told television station Wink that his son told him an object had broken into their house.
He said, “I was shaking. I was in complete disbelief. What was the possibility of something falling on my house with that much force that could cause so much damage.”
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Previous examples of human-made space debris hitting Earth include part of a SpaceX Dragon capsule landing on an Australian sheep farm in 2022. Skylab, the United States’ first space station, falls over Western Australia.
Recently, China has been criticized by NASA for allowing its giant Long March rockets to fall back to Earth after orbit.
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Published: April 16, 2024, 07:51 am IST
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