A 2.9-tonne cargo pallet used for a critical battery upgrade mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is nearing the end of its journey and is expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in the coming days.
The tray was flung from the International Space Station by the trusty Canadaarm2 in March 2021, three years after playing a role in a major battery replacement project on the ISS, and faces imminent destruction in the Earth’s atmosphere.Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell said the tray “will not completely burn upon reentry—about half a ton of debris could hit the Earth’s surface,” McDowell famous on X.
This is the end of the track The heaviest space junk on the International Space Station, it gradually plummets toward the earth like a fly sucked into a kitchen drain. McDowell said the cargo pallet is expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere between 7:30 a.m. ET on March 8 and 3:30 a.m. ET on March 9. The exact location of reentry is unknown.
The pallet “is the largest object ever jettisoned from the International Space Station, weighing 2.9 tons and more than twice the mass of an early ammonia service system tank jettisoned by spacewalker Clay Anderson during the 2007 STS-118 mission.” NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo in March 2021. The pallet was released about 265 miles (427 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.
The pallet’s journey began with a mission to upgrade the International Space Station’s power system. In May 2020, a Japanese cargo ship docked at the International Space Station to transport SUV-sized equipment pallets to assist astronauts in replacing old nickel-metal hydride batteries with new, more efficient lithium-ion batteries. The upgrade is part of a larger effort that begins with the February 1, 2021 spacewalk by astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover And end. The mission involved four resupply missions aboard Japan’s H-II Transport Vehicle (HTV) cargo spacecraft, 13 different astronauts and 14 spacewalks, replacing 48 nickel-metal hydride batteries with 24 lithium-ion batteries over six years. These batteries store energy collected by the space station’s solar arrays.
However, the uncontrolled disposal of the pallets was not part of the original plan.This was necessary because spacewalk plans were disrupted 2018 Soyuz rocket launch failure, which forced NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to make an emergency landing on the grasslands of Kazakhstan. This incident resulted in a backlog in the disposal of such equipment. Typically, old batteries are placed inside the HTV and discarded from the International Space Station, where they burn up upon re-entry.
However, in late 2018, due to a rescheduled spacewalk, one HTV left without a battery tray. As the battery replacement mission continued, and no more HTVs of the older design were expected to arrive (they would be replaced by HTV-X cargo vehicles), the decision was made to independently discard the pallets.
This brings us to the unresolved runaway re-entry. It marks the conclusion of this story—assuming the falling debris does not harm anyone or damage any property—but it serves as a reminder of the challenges and complexities inherent in managing and adapting to space missions.
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