NASA is on the case after something fell from the sky and smashed through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home a few weeks ago.
The nearly 2-pound object likely came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore off the roof and two floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.
Otero was not home at the time, but his son was. Nest home security cameras captured the sound of the collision on March 8 at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC). This is an important piece of information because very close to 2:29 pm EDT (19:29 UTC) US Space Command recorded a piece of space debris re-entering the atmosphere from the space station. At the time, the object was on a course over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.
The space junk consists of exhausted batteries from the International Space Station, attached to a cargo pallet that was supposed to be returned to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays caused the cargo pallet to miss its chance to return to Earth, so NASA ditched the batteries on the space station in 2021 to prepare for an unguided reentry.
CBS Southwest Florida affiliate WINK News first reported Otero’s possible encounter with space debris. NASA has since recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to NASA spokesman Josh Finch.
Finch told Ars that engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will “analyze the object as quickly as possible to determine its origin.” “More information will be provided once the analysis is complete.”
Ars reported on the reentry on March 8, noting that most of the materials in the batteries and cargo spacecraft were likely burned up upon impact. Temperatures reach thousands of degrees, and most of the material evaporates before reaching the ground.
According to NASA, the entire pallet, including nine discarded batteries from the space station’s power system, weighs more than 2.6 tons (5,800 pounds). Dimensionally, it is about twice as tall as a standard kitchen refrigerator. It’s worth noting that objects of this mass or greater often fall to Earth along guided trajectories, but they are usually failed satellites or spent rocket stages left in orbit after completing their missions.
Otero said in a post on
If the object were owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could file a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Aerospace Law Center at the University of Mississippi.
“It would be more interesting to find out that this material did not originally come from the United States,” she told Ars. “If it is a man-made space object launched into space by another country that causes damage to the Earth, then that country is absolutely responsible for the damage caused to homeowners.”
That might be a problem in this case. The batteries are owned by NASA, but they are mounted on a pallet structure launched by the Japanese space agency.
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When it returned to Earth on March 8, a NASA spokesperson at Johnson Space Center in Houston said the space agency “performed a thorough debris analysis evaluation of the pallet and determined that it will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere harmlessly.” That’s so far The largest object ever thrown from the International Space Station. “We do not expect any portion to survive re-entry,” NASA said.
However, research by other space experts does not square with NASA’s statement. Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, said a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of a large object’s mass will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-metal hydride batteries are made of relatively dense metal.